Sunday 28th August - Ivy House open match

Today I decided to go to ivy house for the open match.
With 21 anglers fishing we were spread over the match lake and Willows.
I really wanted to draw on the match lake.  Somewhere in the middle of the lake. 
I drew peg 4. This is a good area. It's not quite in the middle of the lake so I'd of preferred peg 5 but I fancied peg 4.

I just set up to fish a simple pellet match.
Paste short at the bottom of the shelf.
0.3 gram float. 0.18 F1 spider mainline to an 0.15 hook length. With the 2.6mm colmic Hollow elastic.

I also decided to fish pellets at 14.5m where I'd fish loose feed pellets and fish shallow or paste over the top.

I began the match short and foul hooked one and lost it within the first 2 minutes. 

I then went out to 14.5m and began catching a few carp steadily on paste. At around 2 and a half hours in I had about 4 carp and a bream.

Gary Donachie on the opposite bank was catching well and I think he had around 7 fish so I was behind. And had to do something to catch him up.
I picked up my shallow rig and really tried to make it work as normally the fish here are bigger shallow.

Soon enough.  After 15 minutes of really working I began catching the odd fish shallow and they were deffintly a better stamp.

Going into the last hour I had around 12 or 13 carp and was hoping i could catch a few more to try and bump up my weight. 

I thought I could get into a bit of a rhythm by catching 1 on the paste then nick one shallow but this didn't really go to plan. I only managed 1 carp last hour and somehow hooked 4 and lost them all!

I managed to weigh in 79-0-0 which after packing up and going back to the cafe I found out it was enough to win!

I'm hindsight I felt I should of not bothered with the short line as I wasted to much time trying to catch on that and I think its to shallow on this bank to catch that short but It should help my approach for next time.