Parry Takes Top Spot - Steve Parry

After the previous weekend’s good results last weekend couldn’t come quick enough for me. Most of Friday was spent preparing my gear, tying rigs; renewing elastics and sorting bait to make sure that everything was spot on.
My first match of the weekend was the third round of the Partridge teams-of-five winter league. After drawing some bad pegs in the two previous rounds the Guru team needed to try pull things back a bit.

I drew pool four, peg 100; a decent peg that hadn’t been great lately. In fact, the whole team drew pretty badly!
I set up five rigs; two for fishing across at 3ft and 4ft, an edge-rig to pallet, a track rig in about 6ft and a rig for down the slope to my right. All the rigs were tied on 0.13mm N-Gauge main line and a 0.10mm hook length to a size-20 LWG.

The first three hours were really slow for me with just an odd F1 on maggots on various lines. Finally, my track swim came good the last hour yielding enough for me to salvage something. I ended up with 33lb 14oz for 4th on lake getting beat for the section by 2oz. The team had no blow-outs on the day so we ended up with 19 points, a good result from average pegs, which put team Guru second on the day and moved us up to second in the league.

It was back to Blundells on the Sunday, the scene of last weekend’s triumphs. I drew peg nine, a peg I’d not fished before but in an area that I knew held a few fish. I spent 40 minutes plumbing up to find the sunken bars that I mentioned in the last blog. I finally settled on three rigs: one in front of the bar at eight metres in 7ft, one on top of a bar in 4ft and one at 16m behind the bar in 8ft of water. All of my rigs were the same as the previous day. Pellets were the chosen bait and I started at 8m. The first hour was poor, with just one F1 and a few skimmers in the net, so it was time to try the back of the bar. This was my banker for a few fish.

The next three hours saw a steady run of chunky F1s and the odd small mirror; nothing spectacular, but as the lake was fishing slow I stuck at it. All the time I was priming a line on top of bar for last hour. The long line was pretty much exhausted, so with 50 minutes to go it was time to try on top of the bar. It took about 10 minutes for my first bite on this new line but in the last 30 minutes I put another eight in the net, just tapping in 20 micros and fishing a 4mm expander on hook.

The scales arrived and Kieran Rich had 43lb on the end peg to my left and even after throwing a 3lb F1 back I was glad to weigh 48lb. I followed the scales for rest of weigh-in and Gary Whally was last weigh but his 44lb wasn’t enough to pip me, so I was well pleased with another win!