Chiton trinity , woodland lake, weds open,

I had 19 turn up which is one more than is comfortable on this lake in the winter, but the pegging was still ok with only two anglers not having an empty peg on one side at least, after the usual warm welcome from fishery manager misha with the free tea and coffee for all I got the draw going, steve evans picked out two tickets and handed me one which turned out to be 26 , the other ticket in his hand was peg 2, why couldn't he have handed me that one, he must have spotted the 2 staples in the ticket and realised it was special lol.
For company I had mike gaga west on 27 and Leon Hubbard on 24, I set up a 4x18 rig with an 18 middy 6313 on .12 and after a bit of plumbing around I found two areas where I had the same depth so need for another rig as this would do for the 13 &16 mtr lines, I set up a 4x14 float to fish into the empty peg to my right as this can be very effective on this venue, but not today as although I tried it several times i only managed one bite which was a roach so that was a waste of time so I won't mention that again, but I will say that I don't think I could get in tight enough to the edge as there was a bush in the way and I had to fish into 5 foot of water which was about 2 feet more than I wanted.
Recently a bit of soaked pellet of various sizes as feed and double maggot fished over the top has been working ok, so after feeding both the long pole lines I started at 13 mtrs but was struggling to get maggot to the bottom with micro roach and Rudd nailing the bait on the way down, a change to corn produced not even a tremble on the float, mike on my left was on the soft pellet and had an early carp and a couple of skimmers, a few carp and skimmers were being caught but it wasn't as good as thought it may be , we all thought it would fish really well as it was so mild, but we should have known better, as most venues in the area were hard, all the excess water may be unsettling the fish,
I upped the feed which seemed to stop the small roach but now I couldn't get a bite off anything, mike was still getting odd bites on soft pellet, so I got off my box with my begging bowl for some expanders, back on my box I did get some skimmers but I was going nowhere fast, and with several anglers now catching carp it looked as though the main money was going to be out of reach, by switching between the two long pole lines I kept putting odd skimmers in the net, but they were a bit small with them going 2 to 8 oz but even they were hard to get a bite from, about 90 mins from the end I started feeding caster at 5mtrs and I soon started catching chunky roach in the 2 to 6 oz bracket, I should have done it a lot earlier (this will be a telling off from mr nicholls) as I think I would have been at least second in the silvers or possibly first but I will never know, I also had a 6lb carp here and apart from being briefly attached to a fouler early on that was the only carp I hooked.
The scales gave me 10.9 of silvers and my lonely carp was 6.4 for a 16.13 total, I was only  5 oz short of second in silvers and about 2 1/2 lb off first in silvers, never mind there is always Sunday
1st on the day went to mark peopleton on peg 31 with 66lb, catching most of his carp down th edge into empty peg 39 on soft pellet, he also had the biggest fish I have ever seen weighed in on this lake at 15.2
2nd Anton page who managed to moan 40. 8 onto the scales off peg 17
3rd dave evans 28lb peg 6
4th steve evans 27.9 peg 2
5th Philip Harding 27.5 peg 3
6th eddy wynne, 23.2 peg 7
Silvers
Nick collier 13.2 peg 32
Philip Harding 10.14 peg 3
Tony rixon 10.9 peg 26