Stathe Drain – Dave’s Match Cup – 1st September 2024

The next Stoke match was Dave’s Cup at Stathe Drain, the Ilminster contingent stopped at McD’s for a disappointing breakfast before heading to the venue. A great turnout of 21 anglers with everyone hoping to draw one of the pegs at the car park end (1-6), quite a few of them went early, I delved in and pulled out….. peg 16, so my drawing arm is still crap!

It was a fair old yomp and it took me multiple trips to get there and when I finally arrived I was certainly blowing a bit. My swim was the first one above a concrete bridge and as normally any kind of feature on a drain is a bonus, I quite fancied it. Ian Brister was the other side of it and Dave Nash was the next angler on my left. All the swims had been nicely strimmed and numbered for us so a massive thanks to Dan Baldwin and TAA for doing that.

I set up a 4×12 Preston Innovations F1 Maggot for a line down the middle at 10 metres,  a little 0.3 gram float for fishing through the water and a heavy rig for chopped worm across by some weed and also angled towards the bridge at 11.5 metres. On the side tray I had maggots, worms, casters, hemp, disco pinkies and some Bait-Tech Pro Nat Dark.

On the whistle I cupped in a little groundbait and some pinkies at 10 metres before feeding both the worm lines. Starting with a single disco pinkie down the middle, I was expecting to get bites straight away but it took nearly ten minutes before the float finally went under and I swung in a roach. Another next chuck had me thinking they’d arrived but then I couldn’t buy a bite!

A further biteless twenty minutes passed so I picked up the light rig and went across to the far bank. I started getting the odd small fish on pinkie but it wasn’t fast and furious. With an hour gone, I probably didn’t have 8oz in the net and was itching to have a look on the chopped worm lines.

After a few minutes, I had a lovely positive bite and although the resulting 4oz perch wasn’t the bonus fish I was hoping for, it was very welcome all the same. Another three perch followed quite quickly and then the float sunk from view very deliberately and the strike was met with solid resistance. At first nothing happened and it felt like I was snagged up but then the fish nodded a couple of times and I was sure I’d hooked a big bream.

As I shipped back carefully it wasn’t doing a lot and then I could see in the clear water it was a decent eel which I netted without too much fuss. I was getting regular indications and added two more perch but then it slowed up so I refed it and had another look down the middle but no more bites and it was a similar story across with the light rig.

Dave N went for a walk to see how they were doing below the bridge and said his mate Paul Smith was catching some quality roach and Ian was getting a few fish as well. I was about to go back on the chopped worm line when the drain began pulling really hard as the pumping station started up. There was loads of weed coming down and I couldn’t present a rig any sense on any of the longer lines.

I had to resort to fishing a top kit in the edge catching some tiny (and I mean tiny at about eight to the ounce!) rudd. It didn’t take long to get fed up with that so tried running the light rig through with the flow down the middle and began getting some roach along with a couple of silver bream/pommie things. The pumps stopped with around half an hour to go so I fed some more chopped worm and caster at 11.5 metres and would spend the remainder of the match trying to catch a big fish.

With around 15 mins to go, I had a nice 6oz perch and just before the all out, had another indication that didn’t develop. I ended up with 1 eel, 7 perch plus a few small fish and some tiny rudd. We’d had some rain on and off all day but as we were packing up, it lashed it down (which was nice!).

The weigh in for our section started with Chanter on end peg 21 who said he’d really enjoyed himself catching some nice rudd for 3lb 8oz, Norts next door weighed 1lb 4oz and Derek G had 11oz, Dave Phillips chucked back, Dave N weighed 2lb 11oz and then my fish went 3lb 8oz so it had been hard going above the bridge.

The other side of the bridge saw some better weights, Ian Brister had 4lb 4oz before Paul Smith had some quality fish for 7lb 1oz, Dave H weighed 2lb 13oz, Mike G had 5lb 4oz and last to weigh in our section was Danny B who had a nice net of fish for 5lb 8oz which put him second so far.

After I finally made it back to the car park (big thanks to Bagger Burton who gave me a hand with my kit), it was time for the results and as expected the weights got better the closer you got to the pump end. Bagger had the top weight with an excellent 12lb 7oz from peg 4, Fieldy did really well on peg 10 finishing second with 9lb 11oz, Bob N and Rob C were joint third with 7lb 11oz from pegs 3 and 5 respectively and Dave P was fifth with 7lb 2oz on peg 1.

1 – Ian Burton (Taunton) – 12lb 7oz
2 – Graham Field (Taunton) – 9lb 11oz
3 – Bob Newbury (Stoke) – 7lb 11oz
3 – Rob Cox (Ilminster)  – 7lb 11oz
5 – Dave Pope (Stoke)  – 7lb 2oz

Section A
1 – Terry Morgan (Stoke) – 6lb 4oz
Jnt 2 – Nick Payne and Steve Parker (Ilminster) – 5lb 6oz

Section B
1 – Paul Smith (Stoke) –  7lb 1oz
2 – Danny Blunn (Stoke) – 5lb 8oz

Thanks to the generosity of Rob Cox (£4) and Ian Burton (£1), the Nugget-O-Meter has now reached the amazing total of £401.

There’s still a great offer running if you fancy treating yourself to some new fishing gear, use the exclusive discount code AgainstMenandFish10 to get 10% off when you shop online at Somerset Angling

Also I still have copies of my book available from eBay here or Amazon here

And if you could spare five minutes to leave a nice review on Amazon, it would be very much appreciated.

Next up – Summerhayes

Coming soon – Lots more match reports

#sponsoredpost #affiliatelinks