Redhill Fishery Pairs match - Saturday 17th September.

I have been looking forward to this match for a while now.
To me Redhill is a venue that I've never been to before and a while back my good friend James Allen asked if I would like to fish the pairs match with him.
It's a 2 match series. Held on the 17th of September and the 24th of September.

After the hour and 15 minute drive from my house i arrived in a very sunny Monmouth and was really impressed with how tidy the venue is.

After a bit of discussion James decided to go on Sophies lakes meaning I was on Mollies.
Both lakes are a similar size with around 20 pegs on each lake.

I drew myself peg 17.
After arriving at my peg I did quite fancy it.
I had Ripple. A nice looking edge and a bit of depth.
Because I have never fished this venue before I decided to fish what I'm confident in and see how it goes from there.

I based my approach like this:

14.5m of my Colmic Airon F44 pole.
Here I would fish on the deck and shallow over the top on pellets. 

A short line at top 5 with pellets and paste.

An edge line. 11m to my right to the next pallet. Where'd I'd feed groundbait and dead maggots.

I kicked the match off with a big pot of bait down the edge and threw a few pellets in short. And pinged some bait long. 

I had an F1 first chuck on my short line and was clear it was going to be a fish race.  The fish are averaging around a pound with a few bigger carp dotted around. 

After the short line not really kicking off I shipped out my deck rig at 14.5m and began catching well. I didn't really feel I was catching well enough as the anglers on the opposite bank were catching as quick as me but short, meaning they were landing there fishing quicker so had to force my peg a little earlier than I like to. 

By now it was around 12 o'clock and I felt I needed to do something before I got to far behind. (With it being a fish race, once you're behind its very hard to catch back up.)

So out came the shallow rig. A few tweaks to the rig and feeding. And i was flying. It was noticeable the fish were smaller but I could catch them a lot quicker.

Between 1:30 and 2:30 I caught quite well and all the while I had been feeding some bait down the edge.

At this point there was a bit of of a dry spell where no one really caught so a quick look down the edge saw a few more fish coming to the net and just helped me tick over. Although I was catching down the edge I think this did a number of things which I felt helped.
1 - it rested my shallow line even though I was still feeding it.
2 - I caught a few bigger stamp fish down the edge.

At 3:00 there were 30 minutes remaining so I went back out shallow as the edge line seemed to die. Resting it proved really good and once again I began catching.

Last 15 minutes I Couldn't get in quick enough and had around 7 or 8 fish in this time.

I finished the match with around 65 - 70 fish.
Give me a total weight of 80-0-0. So as you can tell they were small fish.

This was enough to win my lake with 65lb second and 3rd was 60lb.

James Allen did really well off peg 14 sophies to weigh 160lb and second on his lake.

This match is done on weight and we're leading it going into next weekend. So hopefully we have a couple of good draws and do well!

Thanks for reading.