Lindholme Festival Day 1

Garbolino Lindholme Summer Festival Day One
Monday 22^nd July 2013
This an event I was delighted to win in 2012 and it is well worth putting the time and effort into, because it carries a top prize of £1,000 plus big payouts for the entire top six anglers. That’s thanks to the generosity of the owner Neil Grantham, who always stumps up some of the cash himself. On top of that he also gives us multiple lakes, meaning plenty of extra space and excellent fishing, plus a free meal as soon as you come in from each match. The bloke really is an absolute diamond.

This is the second Lindholme Festival of the year, I never get the time to do the May one unfortunately. The format involves sections of five or six anglers, with four of your five daily results counting, thus you can drop your worst. However in the event of a tie, your dropped result comes into play. This worked in my favour last year as I tied at the top with Maver’s Ian Giddins, but his worst result was a third, compared to my second. Would the dropped result come into play again? The very nature of it means you have to scrap hard for every point, even if you realistically can’t win a section you sometimes have to fish for a second or third.

Day 1 is always held on the complex’s famous Bonsai Lake, a lake I probably know better than any other, having drawn just about every one of its 85 pegs at some point or other. To open the festival my grubby mitt pulled out peg 78 and I was happy. This put me on the right hand side of the spit, with a reedy island to fish to at about 15.5m and a decent edge to the left where a tree sat next to the vacant peg 77.To win festivals and matches you have to be attacking and I knew much of my week would revolve around fishing up-in-the-water. If you can get fish competing very shallow and come back with one every chuck, the other four anglers in your section are going to find it very difficult to beat you. The reed cover of these islands, plus the fact its 2-3ft deep neat them, means the carp and F1s in Bonsai are always willing to come shallow in the warmer months.


Bonsai 78

I set up three different shallow rigs to fish towards the island, plus a rig to fish in the only gap in the reeds which allowed me to virtually touch the bank. It was about 2.5ft deep here which I knew was too deep, but I intended to start here while building the shallow line.
I also prepared a 5m rig which I didn’t expect to use and a margin rig for the last hour, in case I needed lumps to get me out of jail. At the start I shipped across with a large piece of worm and worms and casters in a kinder pot, and it didn’t take long to catch a small mirror about 1lb 8oz. I had another go but I didn’t feel this bait was right so I changed to 6mm meat and put a couple of small F1s in the net. Then the line bites started and I knew it was pointless carrying on as I was in this depth of water – it was simply too negative.
I had been feeding my shallow line with fishery pellets for 20 minutes and I decided to give it a go. Sport was slow to begin with, although I was catching an odd F1, before it began to get better. A few nice mirror carp up to 4lb were welcome additions to the net before the fish seemed to back off and I was forced to chase them near the island.

At this point I was happy how things were going. I always keep an eye on the anglers around me in festivals to track how I’m doing and I knew Alex Dockerty and Greg Norris were only getting an odd fish in the 80’s to my right, while my mate Frankie Gianoncelli was not bagging on peg 74 either. Sport was starting to slow but I persevered as I know that the shallow line often bursts into life in the afternoon at Lindholme and this proved to be the case. At about 2.30pm things started to take off and I was getting bites almost as soon as I slapped the rig in. I really bumped up my weight over a 1.5 hour period and although Frankie was now catching well, I knew I had a good start on him. I could now afford the luxury of taking a gamble and feeding my margin with groundbait at 4.15pm with 40 minutes left, although I wouldn’t try it unless I saw signs of big fish there. I fed this line again at 4.30pm and soon a few clouds appeared, but it wasn’t until 4.40pm that the fish really grew in confidence and tails were waving at me.

I couldn’t resist having a go for these fish and I dropped an 8mm piece of meat in down the edge. My float was washing around in the swell of all the tails and I wished I’d made a bit more effort to really clear my peg a bit more to fish with the rig touching the bank, but I was soon pretty close to it. Suddenly a 5lb’er hooked itself and was soon in the net thanks to 18-22 Middy Blue Hollow. It’s a bit softer than its rating but it’s very important to fish heavy gear in the edge because you can put a lot of weight together in a very short space of time. You can’t however, if you fish soft elastics and light lines because you’ll spend ages playing each one! In the last 15 minutes I put another three decent fish in the net, probably accounting for 20lb in total with the other one too. It had been worthwhile as this was a better catch rate than the shallow line.

Although Frankie recorded 106lb, I knew I had more than this and my four weighs totalled 149lb for a section win, I should really apologise to Alex here because this was 100lb more than he recorded, sorry mate! It was also enough for third in the match (the top three are paid out each day in an optional super pool) behind 155lb on peg 35 by Andy Middleton, and 153lb by Jonny Corless on peg 55. Had I got the edge line right immediately I could have had six or seven carp instead of four in that last period and perhaps took the match too but I was more than happy with this start.