24 Hour Match Saturday 25th August

Got to the fishery at 6.45 and reported in for breakfast, and whilst the bacon sizzled, myself and a few taking part chose the swims on the specimen lake and set about pegging them out.

After breakfast, the draw took place at 8am and I drew the peg on the left hand side of the island. The all in was called at 9.30am and after casting out my carp rod on my left into 7ft depth of open water on a large method feeder, I concentrated my efforts fishing a quivertip on my right hand rod within two foot of the island margin.

During the day, I struggled and the angler across the island from me seemed to be pulling them out.

On the island, all I was getting was roach, albeit, a good stamp of fish, but the carp seemed to have none of it. On my left hand rod I had caught a few carp and lost a very big cat at the net, but I went into the darkness only having caught about 60lb of fish including a catfish of 10lb, but the angler across the lake from me having well in excess of 130lb.

Disaster struck when I went to turn on my headlamp which I had tested and put new batteries in only the day before, only to find it now didn't work. I lost the next half a hour trying to find an angler on the lake who had a spare. Luckily, someone had one and  very kindly lent it to me.

Now that I could see, I attached a nightlight to my feeder tip and decided a change needed to be made, but what?...

I decided to come away from the island margin, and cast out the large method feeder into open water on my right, and to cast my feeder rod over to the left on the spot where I had been casting the large method feeder. The change made the difference and I started catching carp on the quivertip almost immediately and through the night I set about catching 170lb of carp between 10pm and 5am.

As soon as the dawn broke and the sun began to rise the swim began to slow down but it seemed that a busy night seeing me repeatedly visiting the scales, meant that I ended up winning the match weighing in 238lb and the guy over the lake from me weighed in at 221lb for second place.