Last Saturdays Division 1 National was a grueller for most people, if you never drew an end peg or a feature peg, a kilo was a massive weight.
My Dorking team mates put in less effort than we usually do, we found it hard to get excited about the venue, our total team practice consisted of 5 of us spending one day on the last weekend of practice, I managed to win the Sunday match with 7lb 1oz of dumpy roach on squatts, a lovely days fishing.
Despite this lack of practice, we felt that we had drawn up a good plan from what we had seen that weekend. the basic plan for most pegs was to start on bread short, feed some red worms in terre de river somewhere in the peg and cup in 8 big balls of ground bait in 2ft of water across and then spray squats over the top.

My match started off quite well, I caught 6 quick roach on the bread, followed by 6 small perch on the red worms before I went over the far side on squats. I could only get an odd bite over the ground bait from small roach and perch, but at least it was bites. After an hour I couldn't get a bite anywhere else in the peg except over the far side, by constantly lifting and dropping the rig I was able to get the odd small fish, while the people around me struggled to catch anything.

I drew K section, it was a very nice looking section, with easy access and comfortable pegs, not too many people walking along the tow path and not one piece of dogs c**p, I'm sure it would have fished a lot better had there not been so many matches in the run up to the event. The draw was at St Georges Park, training ground for the England football team, its an amazing place, but there was only 3 toilets between 600+ people, now I know what its like when my misses complains about queuing for the loo.

I was able to get the odd bite for most of the match, except the last 45 mins, and weighed in 920g, which put me 5th out of the 28 anglers on my scales. I was the lowest weight in the team, everyone else caught over a kilo, this gave us 416 points for the bronze medal, a result we were happy with considering we had 3 anglers on International duty and the amount of effort we put in.

Congratulations to Shakespeare on a fine victory, they know the water like the back of their hand and it was a well deserved victory for them, also well done to Maver Image for a silver medal two years on the trot.

We can now look forward to the World Club Champs fish off at the end of the month, thats after I get back from World Champs in Poland.