Hillview sunday open.

After a chat with Gabe Scarba yesterday it was off to Hillview for another crack at getting a decent wieght. It seams every time I go there it fishes poorly with low weights, and today turned out no different. With almost every peg on the venue being used, as there were pleasure anglers, 28 in the open, and a hastily arranged club match because of yet another double booking stuff up at Windmill fishery, it looked like it could be hard. The Windmill fishery organisation is little short of farcical at times as he had booked a club match on the same day as 6000 scouts would be using all the facilities. Even stranger as I thought there were opens there every Sunday. They realy need to get their act together. Anyway, I drew peg 45 on the first canal and apart from Gabe opposite me on the second canal I didn't know anybody else there. And by the accents of most they all seemed to be from the Islamic principality of Birmingham. 4 rigs today. A dibber for slapping or mugging. A .2 slim for 6mm banded hard pellet over 4s at 12 metres against the far side reeds. A .3 slim for maggot at 2+1. And a margin rig to fish maggot or corn in the margin. But after 5 goes in the second half of the match that line was biteless so no more on that. Started across on pellet and fouled a small carp in the wrong end that i just netted before the hook pulled out. Back in and two lost fish in a row spooked them for a while. 15 minutes before my next fish, a decent carp, then an F1. But bites were very sporadic . A couple of bites or a fish hooked or lost and they would disappear for a while. The guy to my left had stuck on the top 2 line on maggot from the start and started to get a few smaller samples so I followed suit. I took a while before I caught but after a few tiny skimmers and one decent carp that went dead and stayed dead for the remainder of the match. But looking around everybody was struggling for bites. I'd only seen Gabe get the odd fish. So most of the rest of the match was spent across on the pellet line. I did get three on the dibber rig shoved right against the plastic bank eight inches deep after I saw them slurping. But with the fish doing a Benny Hill impersonation, chasing each other around endlessly and crashing through the reeds it turned out to be a very difficult day. But it was hard all over. At the end I guessed I'd had 40lb and was close as the scales went to 37 dead, for a section win. Just shows how bad it fished. Gabe managed to win his section too with 41lb, so a bit of coin going down the M5. Didn't get the full results as I just wanted to get away worried about what the holiday traffic would be like, but as far as I k ow it was won on the lake with 70 odd pound and a mid 50 was second. Overall it fished bad. Off to Landsend tomorrow for one of Mr Rixons knock ups. Let's hope for a better day.