Luke and Jaye – Farlow’s qualifier
Luke and Jaye – Farlow’s qualifier
Farlow’s qualifier April 10th 2015
Weekend before.
Myself and Jaye have been preparing for our Eric’s carp championship qualifier at Farlow’s for the past month. Doing our research on the hot pegs/areas of the lake and the least favoured areas, so that we can get a mental note in our heads before we venture down there.
Our match isn’t until Friday the 10th so we decided to have a pre-match practice the weekend before which happened to fall on a bank holiday.
We sorted our kit out and prepared the bait and so on, which is the deadly nutcracker and the awesome white’s 100% confidence in a bag. I set the alarm for 2am on the Thursday the 2nd April and it takes me an hour to get to Jayes then load up his gear then its back on the road for a further 2.5 hours to Farlow’s, that’s the problem living up north a lot of lakes are down south but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We got to Farlow’s gate for around 6.15am so the travelling was good and not really knowing what to expect when we arrived, we was greeted with another half a dozen cars waiting for the gate opening at 6.30am. We drove in and parked up and we began to have a walk around and it soon became apparent that Farlow’s is not our cup of tea at all, bivvy city came to mind. So we scraped the plan of fishing and we just walked and talked to the angler’s that was on and got as much info we needed and mapped out all the areas that we felt gave us the best chance of a fish or two. While we were there we did witness and helped net a fat scraper 30lb mirror which was nice to see.
After that we got back in our vans and headed out the gate and decided to drive to urban baits HQ before venturing back up to our cambs syndicate and there we stayed for a few days.
Match day
Match day is here and myself and Jaye are buzzing like we usually are and we made that journey back down on the M1 to Farlow’s. We both always get nervous before any match, it’s just a normal thing for us as we always push ourselves to do the best we can. Once through the gates around 6.45am we did the same as the week before and made our way around the lake, getting a plan of the peg layouts and our top 5 swim choices and so on down to the least favoured ones on our list.
We spent a good 1 hour and 45 minutes walking around, talking tactics and listening to previous angler’s that was awake at the time. On our walk we walked into a swim called the knuckle or swim 31 and to our surprise we found a small group of carp milling about over to the island tight and we actually saw 2 carp head and shoulder, so to us that was the location sorted. We both agreed that we would treat this match as we were at one of our syndicates waters and to use our water craft skills as our edge and that’s what we did.
We knew that swim 2 was the HOT peg but we said to each other that it would be the 1st peg to go and peg 9 (peg 31 in a normal situation) is a no brainer to us because the fish are there and we hoped they would stay around if we kept quiet.
I had a dream a few days earlier and the funny thing is that in my dream myself and Jaye came out in the draw 3rd from the bag. So I kept a note on that to see if it would come true and the draw began and the names came out the bag and 3rd out the bag… you guessed it we was 3rd out. I looked at Jaye and said “would you believe that mate”, what are the chances of that.
Peg 2 was taken straight away so no surprise there and we opted for peg 9 as we agreed and that was it, the rest of the lads got there pegs sorted and we jumped in the van and drove around the lake to our peg which is going to be home for the next 48hrs.
Myself and Jaye sat at the water’s edge going over what we was going to do to start with and the approach we will go with. We had a good chunk of water out in front of us so we knew we had plenty of options to play with. We knew that open water wasn’t really doing much at the moment so we decided to fish tight and I mean tight to far margins and island margins, literally inches from them. So accurate casting was in order of the day and if we didn’t cast tight and accurately we would not get the bites it was that paramount we did or we would suffer.
Hook baits was the trusty 12mm pink nutcracker pop-ups on our special little rig and we fished 15mm and 18 millers of whole nutcracker boilies over the top, one boilie at a time to be more precise with our baiting and we put out roughly a couple of handfuls out on a little and often basis, just enough for one bite.
Fish for one bite at a time, then when you have that bite think of your next bite.
To cut the long story short we managed to fish well, day and night and going through about 7kg of bait we managed to get into 2nd place and secure 2nd place for the remainder of the 48hrs.
7 fish caught with no losses for 118lb and ounces and its even sweeter from an unfancied area that people said has not done a fish for a couple of weeks.
I quote “particularly impressive was peg 31 which was not hotly tipped at all before the match but it was brilliantly fished”.
So that’s that we are through to the semi-finals at Brasenose 2 on the linear complex in June and hopefully if we keep doing what we are doing we will go through to the final and all the way.
As I say if it’s meant to be it will.
Tight lines
Luke and Jaye
