Lavender Farm Fishery. The Match Lake. May 16th, 2004.

Hawthorne AC club match.

Well, the 1st match of the season for Hawthorne AC saw me driving down the M2 on the way to Lavender Farm on a bright warm sunny morning.
In the car-park all the usual suspects and a few new members were assembled for the draw, and with 25 members taking part peg 18 stuck to my hand.
Now the match lake has what you might term a profusion of reeds, not just in the margins, but also on a number of sunken islands giving nearly every peg a feature to fish to.

Peg 18



The problem today however was that the recent spell of warm weather had encouraged the Carp to play Mums & Dads. They were soon thrashing the water to foam all over the fishery and those that weren’t were cruising aimlessly in the upper layers sunning themselves.
The pegging on the match lake also leaves a little to be desired, as it is more than a little tight in places as the photo below demonstrates.

There are 10 pegs in that photo and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to find a length of carbon hitting you in the earhole if the person behind ships back to enthusiastically. 

With the match half way through I hadn’t had so much as a bite despite ringing the changes with pellet, corn & maggot in both the margins and the island at 11mtrs in front of me. Then at 1pm a small group of Carp started to cruise the reeds by the island so on went a foot of line with a 16 hook and 3 maggots and out came the catapult to spray a steady stream of maggots in their direction.

Reeds Everywhere


Now the fact that the islands are sunk means that if you’re not quick, any Carp that are hooked can swim straight through the reeds and out the other side, and 4 managed to do just that, however 11 didn’t manage it and when the scales arrived they totalled 23lbs exactly.
This gave me 7th place overall, which given the outlook half way through the match was I felt a fairly decent result.