Had our first codgers match since lockdown yesterday on the canal near Tring. 16 turned up. As organiser, I had planned the whole thing previously to avoid close contact. For the draw I had a bowl and some disinfectant spray in the open hatchback of my car.
Competitors queued up and sprayed their pools money before placing it in the bowl. Then they came to my passenger door whilst I sat in the drivers seat. I pulled theor number from a bag in full view. We then had a walk off/peg down whereby number one walked to the first peg followed by 2 who sat 15m further down, there were no physical pegs in place as moored boats had to be avoided by another 15m. It took a while but eventually all 16 were in place.
The water had some colour despite the lack of boat traffic. There was loads of floating debris which hampered our light float set ups.
My peg was one of the narrower ones with 5’ down the middle and 3’ hard across.
Started on punch down the middle, taking small roach on a slow sinking, strung out number 10’s, on a 3bb waggler. As usual it wasn’t long before they fizzled out. All the while I’d been pinging casters and hemp across in the shallower water. I slid the float down and tried across with single maggot, again small roach and a tiny rudd. It got quite hot in the sun around midday and the fish switched off completely. I had about 8 small fish in my net and was fearing the worst. I began wracking my brain trying to think of what to do next.
I swapped my waggler to a smaller 2bb version and shallowed it up to 2’ depth and cast precariously close to the far bank vegetation, punch on the hook.
Bingo, it buried on the drop and a roach was landed. I carried on like this for the final hour and a half and made up a fair little net of small roach.
For the weighing in I’d had to devise a way of doing it without close contact. Whilst previously thinking how I’d do it I looked at my laundry drying on a 3 way folding clothes horse. I hung the handles of the weigh sling on the two tops of the open side and dropped some books into it to see if it fell over, it didn’t. So that clothes horse came with me to the match. I zeroed the scales and hung the sling on the clothes horse, stood back, and the angler tipped their fish in. They then stood back while I weighed them in before returning the fish myself.
My roach weighed 1:15:0 which surprisingly got me 4th place. Winner had some skimmers + bits for 2:15:0.
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