part three...
Weaver way of enjoying ourselves!!!
‘Meet you at ten past six at the greasy spoon’ he said, half past came and went, we were meeting all the others at 7 am outside the Little Chef. We were going to be late. Just as we were about to give up hope a large white van bearing the England Disabled Team logo and sponsors badges flew into the car park in a blue cloud of diesel fumes and tyre smoke.
‘Sorry... alarm was set for ten to six not ten to five’, Rick explains.’ He’s obviously still running on IMT (Italian Mean Time). He’s only been back in the country four days, I hope he'd altered his watch back again in that time.
St Christopher to the rescue!
Harry looked remarkably shaken, which was evidently due to being thrown around in the back of the van along with 2 tonnes of gear during their breakneck dash across the Wirral collecting Don, Keith and to Harry on their way to the match. I took pity on Harry and offered him a lift in my car not only to save him from any further personal injury but also because there were no windows in the back of the van so neither could he see where he was going, (or which way to lean on a corner), or talk to the three in the front cab.
A bolted breakfast followed by the rapid onset of indigestion for Rick and his passengers ensured we were at the meeting point only ten minutes late. When we got there we found that as we were late in arriving the others took it upon themselves to pass the time by ordering tea and toast so we spent another twenty minutes waiting for them outside. Things were not going well and we hadn’t even got to the venue.
On our way
Finally we were all ready and a comparatively uneventful twenty minute drive took us to the banks of the River Weaver. The match was to be held on the National Length, (don’t ask me why as there isn’t enough room to put a section of a ‘National’ on it.)
The river here is relatively wide and slow moving, and is a favourite spot for a bit of roach fishing, although after heavy midweek rains I had convinced myself it would be a skimmer and bream match. Behind you on your pegs there is an ornamental lake and in front across the river there are 60 ft high rolling hillocks of rock salt complete with white streaks of pure crystalline salt running down the concrete walls into the river. No need to add salt to ground bait here then. Yes it is a pretty spot indeed, but only if you have your back to the river whilst fishing. The roach sport here is normally good enough to save looking too long and hard at the Winsford Alps and double figure bags of roach are the rule here rather than the exception, but then again we were here.
Somethings never change
I don’t know about your club matches but do you always get the venue when it isn’t fishing well? Are you always being told ‘you should have been here last week’ whenever you go anywhere and more often ‘I don’t understand it, it usually fishes better?'
I can however put to bed the vicious rumour that John Raison has paid us never to go to Gold Valley, can you imagine him paying anyone for anything? I was there the other week and was informed he'd had a Jag in the garage at home for donkeys years and it is still on it’s first tank of petrol. Mind you that cost him £1 a gallon. (Sorry JR)
... anyway back to the match
The draw was made in the normal well organised well behaved way you would come to expect from us. Gone are the days when we needed a draw to decide what order to draw in!
Rick and Don drew end pegs, whilst I and Dave (gums) Roberts had the benefit of a missing peg between us as the concrete wall on the out fall beneath was high enough to give you a nose bleed due to the altitude, so we missed it out. As I’ve said before many of our members are disabled or just plain old so we have to consider their welfare at the outset and anyway it was too far down to the water to safely drop fish into a keep net with any chance of them surviving the ultimate free fall experience.
Rick 'de Niro'
I was pegged next to Rick so we would be able to have a right old chat about the world championship that he went to in his official capacity of Chief Taxi Driver to the England Disabled Team. He obtained this job mainly through him getting the loan of a van and some sponsorship from his employers, Tilcon Mortars, as well as the result of his involvement in supporting his travelling companion, our one armed bandit, Keith in his quest for International selection. Life's a bitch isn’t it when the angler doesn’t get selected to represent his country but his driver does.
As Rick was the downstream end peg it also meant we both had the furthest walk. I could tell Rick’s heart was still in Italy as he attached a large lollipop float onto the end of one top set, which he ultimately fished for the majority of the match.
First test the temperature of the water!
My peg looked OK although I actually fancied the peg above occupied by Gum’s Roberts, or that of Harry Beech our Secretary two pegs up. Rick liked the look of his too, so much so that he had a closer look, much closer in fact. ‘SPLOOOSSSSHHH, ***!!!!!@@@????’ I clearly heard coming from his direction, only to look up to see him wringing his socks out on the bank, followed by his trousers, jacket and coat.
‘Fallen in?' I asked, already knowing the answer and its likely reply. ‘Got your spare clothes in the car?', ‘Oh of course, you’re not in the car are you’, ‘In the van today, Is that right! Oh dear, always the way isn’t it.’
Be prepared... sometimes!
Rick normally keeps a spare change of clothes in the car for incidents such as this. He started to do so just after a incident on the River Severn at Emstry in a club match when he lost his footing on a nasty sloping and greasy bank to slide, topple, and somersault down the steeper bank below and land in the river face down with his rapidly emptying box holding his head down under the water. When sufficient gear had emptied out of the increasingly lighter box into the river he could finally get his head above the water line but his body was still held down by the weight of his carryall and rod bag. He was there more than a few minutes before help accidentally came upon him and he was extracted from the tangle of boxes, bags and rods that now surrounded him on the river bed. Any more than three feet deep and we could have lost him. Pity it would have been a waste of the good peg that he had drawn that day and I suppose we would have had to shorten the match. If I remember correctly he had drawn the scales as well so we could all be still there today waiting for him to come to weigh us in.
A useful tip?
So there he is mixing groundbait and fixing rigs up on his pole sitting on his box in just his bib and brace with all his wet clothes spread up the bank behind him. I had to smile. That was until I realised that I had forgotten the tips for my feeder rod, so that had to go back into the bag.
I was annoyed about forgetting them, I usually leave them in the holdall so I would could never forget them but recently I had to buy a new one as my newly acquired Daiwa pole has extra long sections which won’t fit into a standard rod holdall and as the one supplied with the pole isn’t big enough to fit two clothes props side by side in, so now I have two.
There is (supposed to be) and old Chinese proverb; ‘Man with one watch always knows the time, man with two watches never knows the time’. Other than the fact that I didn’t realise Timex was an ancient Chinese watch manufacturer I now know what they mean.
Spare a rig gov'?
Meanwhile at the other end of the match length Don (I’ve only got 2lb) Parkinson opens his box only to find that all the deep rigs that he’d made with such loving care over the past week specially for this event were still in his kitchen and he had no other rigs that would suffice. Eventually he rectified this state of affairs by begging and grovelling to Keith (the one-armed bandit) on the next peg to borrow some of his. When he'd fixed them to his stonfo and shipped out he found that the rig exceeded the 10ft depth necessary by more than double, so much to Keith's annoyance, he chopped them short.
The pole will have to do
The match starts steadily enough with a barrage of groundbait on the all in. Mine went in on the 9 and 13 metre lines. The long line was for bream and skimmers as I now didn’t have a feeder rod for that job, and the shorter line for the roach which I started to loose feed.
I was quite happy to find that the bites started from the off and I slowly started to catch small roach. After half an hour I heard a few shouts coming from the pegs upstream which were out of normal eyesight, however by surreptitiously standing on my box on tip toes I could just see the next two pegs upstream and I was more than a little concerned to see ten yards of elastic being stretched by what only could be a bream of significant proportions on the pole of Dave (look no teeth) Roberts on my immediate left. I was also concerned as he had drawn the infamous 'Golden Peg'.
The Forest of Weaver!
I now had to try the bream line to see if I could also snare a bonus 2.5lb. fish. First run through the float dipped and the firm strike meet with the solid resistance of what could only be a bream. After 20 seconds when the bream hadn't moved I realised that this was no bream and in fact it was more likely to be a snag. I pulled for a break but the hook pulled out of the snag before anything broke. Another run through slightly inside the 13 metre line met with the same result. Another pull for a break found the snag moving and I started to convince myself that this snag was in fact the large bream I had been hoping for. Within a minute or so I was able to slide my pan net under a lively 1.5lb branch, which was tossed over my shoulder. At least that was the end of the snag and I could now concentrate on the matter in hand and I shipped out 13 metres of pole again to run it through again for some proper bream fishing. Once more the float slid away beneath, by now, the choppy waters of the Weaver. Another smart strike met with the distinctive clunk of yet another branch. ‘Oh dear’ I said, to no-one in particular.
If at first you don't...
This time the hook length went and another hook was tied on. I was now annoyed by the fact that I had put 5 good balls of bait on top of an apparent underwater coniferous woodland, and decided that discretion was not the better part of valour and stuck another 5 balls out on the 14 metre line, after first checking for small sunken barges and the like.
The match continued in a similar vein with me catching small roach off both lines before a good last hour provided me with 4 or five small skimmers, and Rick the odd better roach plus a 1lb perch on his lollipop float before the all out. I felt that I’d got the better of Rick but everyone else could have been on another planet so we’d have to see what the scales brought us.
The guessing game!
The weigh-in started at Don’s end and I didn’t quite make it there before he had got 4-10-0 on the weigh sheet, not that I don’t trust him mind, but at least we all now knew what we had to beat. He usually just tells us that he’s only got a couple of pounds just before putting a stone of fish on the scales. So recently I’ve decided that when he asks me I tell him that I’ve got 2lb less than he’s got, even if he hasn’t told me of his prospective weight by then. ‘Whatyergot’ he asks, ‘only two or three pounds’ I tell him, but frankly I didn’t have a clue.
"Blue is the colour"
Rick was desperate to know what Don had caught on but as his arms were a strange shade of dark blue from the elbows down (I’d been let into his secret the weekend before), I realised that he’d fished elderberries while loose feeding hemp. Judging from the state of his arms he’d either fished them throughout the whole match or had been leaning in them, or made a crumble!
Hemp does the trick
We got down to Harry (six million lira knees), who, after struggling early on, had a better second half match on hemp down the edge. I’d had a couple of fish on hemp further out but found it was slow and I wasn’t catching particularly bigger fish on it. Harry’s peg was noticeable by being completely surrounded by dog shit. No one else had this problem, it was one thing I hadn’t noticed while pegging out but I’m glad I didn’t draw it now.
Piles and Piles
‘You did well to miss all this shit didn’t you’ remarked Don his head turning left and right like a human lighthouse. ‘Didn’t!’ replied Harry. Don looked puzzled as all the piles around him seemed intact. 'Didn’t miss the one you’re standing in then’ he politely informed Don.
Surprise, surprise everyone, including me!
Everyone let out a huge sigh of relief on the next peg as Dave (gummy) Roberts couldn’t match either Harry’s 4-2-0 or Don’s weight so the curse of the Golden Peg survives for another day. The big bream we all assumed he had caught early on was only a 12oz skimmer, on very light elastic! On arrival at my peg next door I still had no idea what I had caught although I thought I would be competitive. I was to receive much severe abuse, particularly from Don, ‘2lb my ****’, as I dragged my net out, to dump just over 6lb into the sling, for what I now knew would be a win and a passage through to the final of our Knockout trophy. I was sure that I had beaten Rick which soon was confirmed by the scales man.
I now had the final of this competition to look forward to the following week , and some serious preparation, well not really. I was more looking forward to a trip down to Gold Valley for the Angling Plus Subscriber Classic.
...find out how I got on in the part 4.
Rick (Barbless lollipops) Keeley with face saving 1lb. perch. Pity it didn’t work, he's still ugly!!!
Dave (World Gurning Champion) Roberts congratulates the winner in his usual magnanimous fashion.
