Well done to Mainline carpers, Rob Tough and Matt Jones who did extremely well fishing their BCAC eliminator this weekend, in the far from favourable conditions. Over to Rob to take up the story:
"Matt Jones and I fished our BCAC eliminator this weekend at Broadlands, as part of the Fox/Mainline team. We came out 6th in the draw, but still managed to get our 2nd choice peg, having scouted the lake during the weeks leading up to the match. Brooklands BCAC matches never fish the same year to year and the weather conditions made the peg draw extremely difficult with very few carp having been caught there through the winter. Our peg had a narrow channel of 20 yards width to our right and opened out from the island to our left. We had a couple of fallen trees in front of us and open water to our left, so we decided to spread the rods to take full advantage of the features. Two hours into the match we lost a decent fish on a line-snag off the fallen tree, and heard that a 15lb fish had been landed from another peg.
We were a little dejected to say the least thinking chances were going to be few and far between, but how wrong we were!
From 8.30 pm to the early hours of Saturday morning we landed 7 carp to 27lb to give us a commanding lead with only 2 other pegs managing 1 fish each (both doubles). We were blown away with the number of fish in exceptionally cold conditions, but we didn't get any more takes in the second 24hours of the match and I feel the fish had moved off, but we had taken good advantage of the 'feeding spell' that had lasted the first 24 hours.
All the takes came to Matts rods on the right hand side and were all within 20 yards range tight to the fallen tree. Not wanting to give too much away on rigs and tactics, we baited heavily using very small offerings and caught using a combination of Cell, Hybrid and Pineapple pop-ups.
We used Fox SSC size 8 hooks, Fox Illusion 15lb mono hook lengths with whipped on braided hairs and Fox-clips to lose the 4oz lead on each take.
We took 1st place with 121lb, 2nd place was 24lb and 3rd place 20lb
This was my 4th 1st place from 6 matches on the BCAC Brooklands lake."
