This could be the shortest blog in my history! We tend to use the Crown league to try out new pegs and areas of the river that arn’t fished or haven’t been fished for ages. This week we were going to fish mainly the Ilford section, this section can be rather hit and miss, as you will see.
I drew peg 45, which thankfully was quite a short walk, I hadn’t fished this peg before although I have blanked from the one above. My peg looked ok with a tree sticking out of the water to my left and some reeds across. We’d had four frosts in the week so would this affect sport? Below me I had Graham Field for company and the next peg in was the old fossil (Malcolm Levy) about half a mile away on peg 43.
I plumbed up and had a decent depth of around three and a half foot, on the whistle I went out in the flow with my usual gram and a half Drennan Carbo, size 18 B611 and 0.12mm bottom, fully expecting to catch a small fish straight away, this didn’t happen and despite trying caster, maggot and half a lobby all over the peg, I remained biteless. After two hours I was still fishless (not even a minnow!) and it was time for a walk.
Graham was blanking below and Malcolm had one chub, Robin Cox in 41 had a couple of small fish and Neil Dring had lost one beast. Then it was onto my nemesis Janders on peg 40A, his swim looked ok although painfully low and clear, despite this he was catching the odd fish mainly dace and chublets. I watched him for a bit, during which time he missed a couple of bites and landed a dace. Now at this point I should have been thinking about getting back and giving it my best shot as a couple of chub would probably get me in the money, but I just could not see me catching anything.
As I wandered back Barney was just walking up from his peg below the road, he’d caught ten chublets but his swim had now died, he did report that Graham had just landed a chub. I settled back on my box with renewed vigor!! for the last couple of hours and tried upping the feed to try and make something happen but all to no avail and I dry netted. I can honestly say I had nothing resembling a bite all day.
Martin Heard won on the day from peg 37 with five chub for 10lb 10oz, Janders was second with 4lb odd and finally took a fiver off me and the old fossil was third with just over 4lb.
So the grand still eludes me, God I hope I do better next week or is this the start of a real dry spell? Tune in next week to find out.
