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The long and the short of it!

It’s been a good week for Joe’s Match Fishing Drawbags team and here he tells all!

Well it’s been another week and yet another winter league round at Tunnel Barn Farm. You may recall last week that we had suffered at the draw bag. Well this week we were hoping to get our campaign right back on track, which meant Jon Arthur taking up the reigns as the drawbag!

One thing I didn’t expect though was his keenness! In fact I arrived at 7.55AM (20 minutes before the official draw time) and Jon had already drawn and was walking around the lakes! Luckily, it was decent news this week and I don’t mind admitting that my peg was the worst of the four in House 14, but it is a peg I've always fancied drawing so I wasn’t despondent at all! Steve Ringer was on Extension 34, which has been a decent area of late; Paul Bick was on Club 11 – again a good draw. Jon drew himself a tricky New 19 but it is always a peg for a few bites.

Upon arriving at my peg I could see Mark Pollard setting up on the flier Peg 29 on House for the second week running. He would certainly be hard to beat given the circumstances. Anyway, back to my peg. House 14 is a very wide peg with a lovely bed of reeds. It has a rake of open water to target too and sometimes the fish can be stacked up there.

First rig out of the bag though was a bread set up for fishing the long pole to the island. And by long I mean 19-20metres! This length put me right by the island and I really fancied a few fish on this approach. A couple of other rigs were readied for the open water lines where I planned to fish maggots.

Everyone else was looking to fish a bomb with popped up bread to the island but I was hoping that I would get an edge by fishing the long pole.

I started my match off on the bread and had my first F1 after about five minutes. This was soon followed by four more of its mates and after an hour I was winning the lake. Polly had about three but all the anglers fishing in open water were really struggling. This may have been because the ice melted the day before and the water temperature had plummeted.

The session was hard work, it took the full 16metres plus four extensions to reach the island and when the bites stopped I needed a break! I chucked the bomb out just to give my arms a break but soon realised that it would have to be the pole.

The rest did the swim the world of good though and when I went back across my next fish was a very handy 8lb mirror followed by a common of the same size! Three more good carp came to the net and all of a sudden I was up to ten fish for a decent weight! I did foul hook a ghostie that tore off around the island before coming off and this was the end of the frantic spell of carp. However it seemed that the F1s had also woke up and five more soon came to the net! I couldn’t believe how many bites I was getting and it was just a case of concentrating and working hard.

With an hour to go the swim was definitely slowing. Polly had started to catch regularly and I knew I needed to change. It was time for the 16m line. It took a while to get going but eight more F1s in the last 30minutes was a nice boost and at the all-out I knew I had done well!

At the weigh in my net went 54lb, which was enough to win the lake and also put me fifth in the match. However I suffered the dreaded split section fate and actually came 4th in my 18-peg section after three anglers on the club pool framed in the match. Fourth was a great result though so it was just a case of seeing how the others had done. Master Paul Bick had done the business and won his section, Steve had come fourth after a solid showing and Jon did well to come fifth off his tricky draw.

This great performance gave us 62 points which was second behind Maver Gold’s 63 points. Luckily for us a couple of other teams in the frame dropped a few points which allowed us to sneak back up to second in the league, just nine points behind Barston.

Follow Joe on Twitter - @carassjoe