Sunday,plantation horse shoe lake

20 booked in for today's match, which in hindsight is probably a couple to many, but having never even seen the lake never mind fished it , it would be a bit of a learning curve as far as the pegging went, i tried to ensure that no one had an Angler opposite or if they did there was an island in between them, it looked ok. To me. I had the last ticket in the bag and ended up with 14 which was up in the top left hand corner of the lake ,opposite a small island at 13 mtrs, the other side of my island was Shane caswell on peg 4 which looked really nice, talking to anglers during the week who have fished the lake recently , it seems to have been fishing hard ,so I went mainly for a maggot and micro attack , so I set up a 4x12 rig with a 20 8313 on .12 line to fish. At 1 o,clock angle to my right in 4 foot of water, the same. Rig would do down to my right in the margin towards the empty peg, I set up a same size rig for slightly up the island shelf and a hard pellet rig for right against the island, at the start I cupped in some mag and micro on the various line and fired some hard 4,s towards the island, starting on the 13 mtr 1 o,clock line with double maggot I had a carp first put in of about 2lb and at the end of the first hour I had 5 in the net, looking round everyone was getting a few fish so it seemed as though it was fishing ok, the swim got slower as expected and I found myself switching around the various parts of the swim , but the 13 mtr line was the most productive , I never had a bite on the island pellet line so I switched it to a maggot line against the island ,but I still only had 2 bites on that towards the end of the match, losing one in a bramble stem and landing a carp,  I found it strange that I couldn't get a bite against the island whereas Shane opposite was catching fish on hard pellet against his side of the island, the only difference in our swims was that he was fishing up against dead reeds but my side I only had brambles and mud, funny things fish, the margin to my right gave me a few fish, on maggot , I ended with about 20 carp, mainly small ones but I did manage  an 8 pounder about 10 minutes from the end which proved usefull,
1st on the day went to Craig Edmunds on peg 5 with 69 lb , catching all his fish on banded 8mm. Over. Catty fed 4,s on top of a shallow bar at 13 mtrs
2nd was me with 50.1 peg 14
3rd Shane caswell 44.4 on peg 4, that 8 lb fish was needed eh Shane
4th Clayton Hudson on 16 with 37.6
5th steve Seager on 7 with 35.3
6th mike west on 3 with 29.8
Silvers went to Paul faires with 8lb of skimmers on murdered worms on peg 17
To be fair it seems like a nice little venue that I can see us fishing a few times this year, we didn't get to many moans , apart from dave roper , but he loves a bit of a moan, and the gimp wasnt to impressed as he couldn't catch enough skimmers on his topkit, other than that most seemed to enjoy it, the islands could do with a bit of a trim but I,m sure goose fat vowels will get round to it as he has
Done a brilliant job on the main lake clearing the islands.
Still got a few spaces for trinity on Wednesday , so book early to avoid disappointment