Silver's league , windmill, round 1

Firstly to let people know, lillypool cafe will be open Sunday morning at 7am with new staff, so we shall have to wait and see how it is, it will have to be good.
Today I had breakfast in Abby,s  cafe in emery road, and for £5.50 it was very good, after that it was a quick skoot around the ring road and I was at the fishery in plenty of time.
Ray bazeley was organising this 8 match series instead of the huntstrete one , and as the people having a sneaky practice said it was fishing ok, I was looking forward to it. Twenty anglers are fishing the series, with it split into 5 peg sections, with only first and second in each section.
Into the draw box and out comes 21, its a peg right in the middle of the island gap, and with the first cold wind of the winter blowing into me , it was likely to be a cold uncomfortable day.

 And as with most venues it was going to be a muddy one.
Only 2 rigs , both the New drennan as5 floats which seem to sit and fish very well, even in rough conditions, a .5 for top set to hand for roach and a .8 for 6mtrs on two lines left and right . Both over groundbait, but with micros to the right and caster to the left, the section was always going to be hard to win as des shipp was sat on 23 standing in for someone ,
Ray called the all in and after putting a ball on both longer lines I went in on the close line , fully expecting the float to go straight under as I had been told small plippy roach were a nuisance, wrong the float just sat there without moving , after 30 mins and only 2 roach fry in the net and with des on about 15, I decided to go to the longer lines, I started getting regular bites dust the fishery were tiny, but with no one else in the section doing much I stuck with it, I wasn't expecting to be able to catch des up , unless I could get a few bonus fish, but they seemed thin on the ground on our side of the lake, unless it was a carp you wanted, but no carp of ANY size counted today unless it was a true crucian. I stuck with it and was rewarded with three better skimmers up to a pound and a tidy perch of about 8oz, but des had a skimmer and towards the end had a crucian, which I new was going to put him out of reach, and so it proved, with his net going 7lb 6oz.

To my 6.1

The match overall was won by Paul barnfield on peg 3 with 8.15 of decent skimmers on soft pellet, it didn't fish that well, probably blue in the main to the first cold snap of the year.