County Champs- Final

• Peg 26 Bridge
• 16lb 4oz
• 12 F1's and 3 small Barbel
• No good.....

Bright sunshine and flat calm Heronbrook was always going to be tough.

The County Champs final is something that I have always wanted to get through for the last couple of years.  I haven’t been good or lucky enough to get through to the final in the last couple of years.  The semi finals for last couple of years has been at Hillview, and have been unsuccessful to get through to the final at Barston.

This is the first year whereby the county champs has had no semi final, as it used to be the top twenty in your county with the highest points would go through to semi final at Hillview and the top 5 would go through from that match.  This year only the top three go through to the final, and the final is at Heronbrook and Gloucestershire’s finalists were myself, Chris Cameron and Steve Ford.  To be honest I did to deserve to be in the final as Neil Mckinnon would have had more points than me, but he decided not to register with the Angling Times County Championships and therefore would not fish County Champs final at Heronbrook, as he was on Preston Innovation festival at White Acres.

After another painful morning with my gout, I was cutting it a little fine and arrived at 9.05am (draw time 9.00am) and Chris Cameron (early bird) had already drawn for us and had three tickets within the envelope and advised me that I was on Bridge Pool 26, which was apparently a good draw, however 27 was in the corner, which have been a much more fancied peg.  My peg was 13 meters wide which made life easy fishing and decided to have 3 lines of attack on the far bank, however the depth were all over the place, to my left it was 4ft deep tight to the far bank, in front was 2ft and to my left was 2.5 ft.  So plenty of time to prepare for my fishing match, I had several rigs set up to combat with the different depths.   Chris Cameron had drawn peg 2 on Meadow and Steve Ford was on the match lake.

I was prepared for a hard fishing match, and I knew that 50lb would be a good weight on Bridge Pool and 70lb would be mega.  However, my match didn’t go to plan as bites were at premium even through a worked hard and hoped the fish would turn up and turn on the last hour which they simply didn’t and unfortunately my 12 small F1’s and 3 barbel for 16lb put me nowhere.  I do believe that the peg was worth forty pounds.  The mistakes I made:

·         Should of feed red maggots and not bronze.

·         Should of carried on dripping six 4mm pellets and not feed micro’s or a full small  “toss top”.

·         Shouldn’t of feed meat and hemp on my left inside margin (should of been maggots again)

·         Should of practiced on the venue.

Well, will have to wait until next year now???

Well Done to Pete Caton, Jon Arthur and Kevin Fowell for winning the event with 27 points.