No sooner than we receive news from Rob Tough regarding his BCAC win this year than we are receiving yet another report of a superb carp match result! This time from the World Carp Classic, where Rob and fishing partner Lee Jackson achieved a late and great second place, podium finish! Over to Rob to take up the story:
"Lee Jackson and I recently competed in the World Carp Classic and managed a respectable 2nd place from 131 pairs of anglers from across Europe. The lake is 27,000 acres (43kms round). The comp was for five nights from 30th Sept until the 5th of October. We flew out after having our gear transported across and after researching the venue and past matches we were as prepared as we could be.
We were afforded what we thought was a reasonable draw and I had a fairly good idea through satellite imagery of the terrain in front of us so we had a head start on the feature finding, the use of Electric engines, dinghy and sonar equipment is a must on these venues (a lot of anglers are now using underwater cameras for enhanced feature finding now).
We were fishing approximately 280 yards from the bank and had found very locallised spots in front of and to the left of Lee (very close to our Czech neighbours and our boundary).
Lee was on the left side of the swim and I to the right. The water was very weedy and presentable spots were few and far between.
Although I found two areas out to our right and at approximately the same distance, but it was Lees features that were to be the most productive in the swim. This mark was very small in area and involved Lee's two rods fished very close to each other in an area of about five yards at 280 yards, the bottom was raised to about 18ft in surrounding depths of appx 23ft and was clear of weed and harder than the soft sandy bottom that prevailed.
We were ejecting 8-10oz leads on the take and baited rigs were dropped from the dinghy above the spots marked with atropa tubes. Over the week we landed 18 carp with the biggest 43lb, for a total weight of 191 kilos.
We used 50 kilos of Mainline Activ-8 flavoured with Maple cream (Maple-8). And further baited-up with 20kilos of Activ-8 Response Pellet. Hookbaits were glugged to harden to alleviate crayfish or nuisance fish.
The result we achieved was further gratifying in as much as neither our two neighbouring pegs to our left and the neighbouring peg to our right caught any fish at all during the match and laid testament I think (amongst other factors) that Mainline's baits stand out from the rest."
