The Suffolk Water Park - Match Lake 1

After a few sessions over the past few weeks carp fishing, and not much in the way of lure fishing found me on match lake one at the Suffolk Water Park for a practice session for a forth coming charity match. This sort of fishing isn’t something i would usually do but its for a good cause so why not. The idea being to have a few practice sessions before the actual match in September, after a slow day on the lake with a mixed bag of Carp, tench, Bream, roach, and eels for only about 40lb, which I wasn’t to happy about, more so for the amount of fish I lost rather than caught, but hopefully a a few lessons learn't for a following session that will improve my weight.

Match Lake Perch and Gold Vibe 70 Lure

After a chat with a few anglers and seeing a few anglers land sizeable perch up to 2lbs from under the willows on pole tactics and chopped worm, I packed away my feeder rod and made up my lure rod. It was almost six o’ clock and fry had been scattering throughout the day in the margins so I couldn’t resist a cast or two along the willows and margins.. After several casts alongs the margins and two follows off a decent double figured pike on a Storm Wildeye Minnow, but without any definate takes I decided to change, so I swapped over to a Lurepro Gold Vibe 70 lure, for more vibration and a bit of flash, as the water in this lake is very murky and I hoped something with a bit more flash would encourage him to strike, but after several more casts, it looked like he had gone. I walked around to the next swim and cast along the willow from the other side, It almost took me by surprise as a slaming hit on the lure, took the line straight under the stadging, after a few seconds it was under control and gently played in to the landing net.

A nice perch of 11/2lbs lay in the net, very pale in colour due the murkyness of the water but it was imacculate. Several more casts, bumping the lure across the bottom on the marginal shelf saw two more perch of 11/4lb and one more at 11/2lb come to the net, a pleasant end to the day, which was a good time to end the session as the heavens opened!!!

A chat with the Parks baliffs earlier in the day revelled that they tend to remove most of the pike below double figures out of the match lakes, but leave all the bigger ones in so with pike in excess of 20lbs in the match lakes and with recorded perch over 4lb’s this lake will definatly be worth a few more casts another day. I would think most people fishing the match lakes very rarely think about the predators in there, I suspect with the coloured water and abundant prey fish lure fishing the match lakes is a challaging prospect.