float only league round 1 viaduct fishery

must say sorry for being late with the blog, i am suffering a bad case of man flu and i havnt really felt like doing anything till now (6.15 monday).
40 anglers were booked in for the series, and all turned up which is good, i was using cambell and cary with 20 on each so sensible pegging ,
i let craig edmunds draw for me so he pulls out 2 tickets stuck together, and i dont think i shuffled the tickets to well as i ended up on 109 which is right down in the narrow corner of cary , whilst trig had 110 which is the corner peg (flier)on cambell.
for company i had bela bakos on 74 which is the first peg up the left hand bank but we have a big willow tree overhanging between us so we wouldnt affect each other, also with bela being in the advanced stages of the flu ours wasnt going to be a quiet part of the lake as bela had a cough that sounded like a dog barking and i was sneezing and coughing
and we were both moaning a lot.
my corner peg seems to be a swim which gives you a few early fish but dries up as the fish move out of the corner so its a case of making the most of the first couple of hours.
due to the strong winds of late there were a lot of willow branches up along the left hand bank making it impossible to fish tight to the bank which is one of the main catching areas, all i could do was fish up to the branches which was about a metre off the bank in 3 foot of water, so i set up a couple of 4x12 rigs on .18 , one for by the branches and one for out by the willow tree where it was about 6 inches deeper, both had 16 b960 hooks on for banded pellet, i set up a 4x12 rig for meat straight out at 16 mtrs with a 14 xedion hook on .16 and also a margin rig for meat up to my right with the same hook and line,
at the start i cupped some 8mm pellets by the marginal branches and by the willow and cupped some meat out to the relevant places in front and out to the right,
going in by the willow tree i had a bite first put in and lost a fish(fouled i think) second drop another bite and an 8lb carp was safely netted even though there were lots of branches on the bottom which the fish seemed to be able to find ever way it turned, so ,so far things were going to plan but that soon changed as i had no more bites for about 30 mins then when i did hook another carp it totally branched me on the inside transferring my hook into a twig, steve did come and apologise for not clearing the branches out but he had been to busy to get round to it.
the swim didnt really fish as i expected as i caught odd carp from both pellet lines during the whole match instead of the early burst i had been expecting, i hooked 12 carp in all landing 7 , also the meat lines were a non starter with not even a bite on it, i did put some 4mm hard pellets at 16 mtrs and had a run of skimmers on 6mm hard pellet,also lost a carp there aswell, in the end i weighd 73lb for second in section so that was ok from the peg really,
1st on the day went to tom mangnal with 159.12 on peg 98 , i think he only had 15 fish all taken on the wag ,some deep and some shallow all on pellet
2nd shaun townsend 153.13 peg 123
3rd tony page 152.15 peg 125
4th clayton hudson 146.13 peg 85
5th gary etheridge 126.8 peg 116
6th ed wynne 116.13 peg 135
silvers
nigel bartlett 73.14 off peg 80 of skimmers, big hybrids, perch and tench on chopped worm and caster