Saturday 20 August 2016

Lindholme Lakes, Don Farm, West Carr, Doncaster.

Maggotdrowning.com
The Maggotdrowners Forum
MD's at Bennys Lake.





So the time had finally arrived to venture out fishing "up North" and the venue for this adventure was to be Benny's Lake at Lindholme Lakes Country Park where I would be meeting up with some of the lads from the Maggotdrowning.com forum for a friendly knock up. Thankfully although I had never fished there I had visited there a few weeks earlier to show my support for The Nick Clark Memorial Match that had been organised by Steak (Steve Akal) so I'd gained a bit of an insight to what was present there and how to go about tackling the place.

As usual for me the excitement of visiting somewhere new meant that I was wide awake long before the alarm went off and after a couple of cups of coffee and feeding the 2 cats I had my gear loaded up and was on the road towards Lindholme. It's not that far for me and after 40 minutes I was rolling into the fishery car park at around 8.30am. A few of the lads had beaten me to it but it was particularly good to see Tony (gingert76) who I hadn't fished with since way back in 2005 when we fished The Eastern Intersite Match at Barford Lakes and Norm who I hadn't seen since 2008 when we fished the River Ebro in Spain, so as you can imagine there was a bit of catching up to do over breakfast.

With that out of the way it was just a question of waiting for Dave to turn up and get on with the draw which duely happened around 9.30am. The weather looked set to do it's best to put a dampener on the day as after a lovely week the forcast for today was for strong winds and showers with the possibility of thunderstorms which had obviously detered a few that were due to fish today. So to the draw and with just 13 of us fishing it was time to dip into the bag which revealed peg 36 was going to be my home for the day.

So a short drive up to the lake and find my peg. Thankfully you can park behind a lot of the pegs on Benny's and although I couldn't it was just a short walk to the peg.
I just had Norm for company along on peg 39 and it looked like we had drawn the short straw in that we were horribly exposed to the elements with the wind blowing strongly from left to right and no shelter from it to speak of.





Setting up was a bit of a challenge with top kits being blown around and off the roosts. It was obvious that fishing anything more than a top 2 + 2 line in the wind was a non starter so I just set up a couple of shallow jigger rigs on 0.15 N-gauge finishing with a 18 Super MWG and a couple of depth rigs for the 4ft of water that I had on my chosen line consisting of 0.4g chianti style floats on 0.15 N-gauge finishing again with a 18 Super MWG. To keep things simple I would just lock up the jigger rigs to fish the margins when the time came. Bait for the day was the question, pellet over slop had seemed to be the chosen way of tackling things, but having never used that approach I decided to do things my way and keep it simple so was just going with 6mm banded pellet over 4mm fishery pellets with some red maggots as a change bait if my approach needed a tweak.





So waiting for the All-In I couldn't help wondering how things would go. The target species on Benny's is very much F1's and I have to admit that I don't really like fishing for them as I find them to be very finicky and frustrating fish, but there's a lot of fisheries up this way that stock them so one way or another I'm going to have to get my head around fishing for them. So 12 o'clock and All-In and a handful of pellets down both margins then out on a 2+2 with a banded 6mm at depth. It didn't take long for the float to bury and the first F1 was safely in the net but the wind was proving to be a real pain, sport wasn't fast and furious but at least it was steady. Maggot was getting bites but only producing small roach and perch so after an hour I decided to stick with pellet as it was accounting for a better stamp of fish.

Looking across it appeared that the others were less troubled by the wind with Norm and I suffering the worst of it on our bank and from what I could see Paul N on 24 and Big Stoo on 27 appeared to be the lads to beat today as they were both catching steadily. After a couple of hours I took a stroll up to Norm to see how he was doing and it just confirmed that he was suffering with the wind just as much as I was. So I took a further stroll round to see how others were doing only to find Webbo tucked away in peg 18 with a flat clam swim and what appeared to be a shoal of Pirana boiling in his swim every time he loose fed!!!! Tony (ginger t) was also nicely sheltered in peg 30 and starting to put a few together.





So back to my peg and if anything the wind had increased and it was starting to look more like rain so as far as I was concerned it was time to take a look at the margins. A quick plumb up revealed around 18 inches so i locked up one of my Jigger rigs to that and took a look with a banded 6mm pellet. First put in resulted in a Tench of around a pound and this was followed by a few F1's. The next bite resulted in quite a bit of black hydro streaming from the kit and after a spirited fight the culprit was revealed as a nice Barbel of around 3lbs.

Showers dotted the rest of the afernoon and while the sport was never fast or furious I was catching steadily enough to keep me happy, mostly F1's with a couple of small commons to add a bit of variety. As always seems to be the case the weather relented just as the All-Out was called. I was reasonably happy with my day and felt I had something close to a "Ton" in the nets leaving me feeling that I hadn't disgraced myself in my first venture out "up North" and with the kit packed away in the car it was time for the scales which revealed that I actually had 116lbs 11ozs. After the weigh in we congregated round Dave's truck where he had fired up the barbecue and over an impromptu burger the results were read out.

Paul N had taken the honours onthe day with 178lbs 05ozs closely followed by Big Stoo with 175lbs 11ozs, a new PB match weight for him. I was 5th and Brandon had taken his first match "Ton" while young Blake won the Juniors with 34lbs 15ozs.




All in All a good day and great company. Lovely to catch up with friends both old and new with a few fish caught between us it really doesn't get much better. Here's to the next one.

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