Lindholme Festival Day Three

Wednesday 29th July

Day three and we were heading to Willows and Laurels Lakes, two open water lakes with a series of spits running out into the lakes, creating different bays. The good news for me was that these lakes are dominated by shallow fishing in summer and I was hoping to draw Willows as I believe it to be slightly fairer than Laurels. Despite the owner Neil (who was holding the bag) telling me not to draw my peg yet in the middle of the queue and to wait a bit longer for a good peg, I ignored him and pulled out peg 51 on Willows.

 My initial thought was one of disappointment because peg 52 was in too and I knew I was in a corner. But when I got to the peg I realised it was still some distance to the corner itself and there was a long edge up to peg 52, which was occupied by Paul Christie (yesterday’s left hand neighbour too). However there were four people in our bay with peg 2 and peg 7 in (end peg 53 and peg 1 are next to each other), whereas every other bay had just two anglers in. I was gutted to see my mate Nick Speed rock up on peg 43 behind me, he had just one other angler in his bay too. Nick is very good on Willows and has a 5m meat line sorted down to a tee on this lake, which has seen some big weights for him in the past. I could only hope that the wind had been blowing down into the bottom bay I was in recently.

On Willows I often spend an entire match fishing pellet shallow, a lot of anglers come here and fish chopped worm and caster slop shallow but I find this too slow (and expensive!). Today I also plumbed up a 5m line for meat and an edge rig to my right where I found a perfect 15ins of water. I actually started the match shallow, something I rarely do anywhere, but it can work immediately on Willows. Unfortunately it didn’t and I soon had to beat a hasty retreat to the 5m line, where I had an odd fish but I was quickly falling behind Nick and the other anglers in the section, who were all catching on this line. I kept the shallow line well fed, it was my only chance, and after about 30 minutes I gave it another go. I started catching an odd fish but I was waiting for bites, but at least I was catching at a similar rate to Nick, who I could see behind my rollers every time I shipped the pole back. Unfortunately a family of grebes had a nest in the reeds to my left and were fishing themselves in the bay. The five of them kept going through my pole line wiping it out, even though they were catching small roach they were disrupting the F1s and resulted in several quiet spells. I could feel the section and the festival slipping away from me…

After an hour what I had been hoping for happened. The grebes moved off to pester another bay and my shallow line really started to kick in. Bites were coming soon after slapping the pellet in and for the remaining 4 hours and 45 minutes I just got my head down to try and catch Nick up. Unfortunately for him his bites slowed down and after a few hours I was sure I had overtaken him. I just kept ploughing on and like Monday, I could even afford the luxury of feeding my margin with 20 minutes remaining. With 10 minutes to go it was heaving and a big mirror and a ghostie even poked their heads out and had a look at me. But I was getting a fish a chuck shallow still and I resisted the temptation to come off it.

On Laurels Lee Kerry won the second section with a terrific 173lb from peg 33, but this was bettered in the overall stakes by Andy Bennett who amassed 193lb on peg 56. A brilliant performance, he made it pay shallow on a good peg with space. When Nick Speed weighed 99lb and Dave Shires 138lb in my section, I knew it was mine and my total was 175lb 9oz, my third biggest weight ever. This was enough for second overall on the day.

The individual festival positions were starting to take place. Andy Bennett was looking seemingly unstoppable with three straight section wins and 100lb-plus hauls, but he was in exactly this position last year so it can still change. Craig Elkin was sitting second and my five points was third. Tomorrow we are bound for Loco, Beeches and Strip, much peggier lakes where anything can happen!