When Andy Bennett rolled into Bank End Fisheries in Doncaster for the third leg of his Unknown UK Venues series, he had not seen the lake, had not seen the peg, and admitted out loud to camera that his match plan was being rewritten in real time.
"I ain't got a clue what I'm doing. I'm going to make it up as we go along," Bennett said as he surveyed the corner peg the locals had pointed him toward. "Luckily, there's no bait limits, so we can basically do what we want. So if something's not working, we can change it."
Bennett, drawing one of Bank End's reed-corner pegs in 6.5 ft of water, walked viewers through the kind of read-the-day match thinking that has earned him a reputation on the English commercial circuit. With a 6-hour match ahead, an empty venue card, and a bright sunny forecast, he stripped his approach down to three lines: a short pole line on meat, a long pole caster shallow line aimed at F1 carp, and a margin line on micro pellets and dead maggots for later.
"You've got to look at the conditions and try and think what are the fish going to do," he said. "It's going to turn from being overcast now to a bright sunny day. That's really important."
The first hour and a half was, by Bennett's own admission, scratchy. His peg sat in shade, the meat line refused to produce, and his neighbours were starting fish on short pole. The breakthrough came when he stopped fighting the venue and started fishing where the fish actually were — tight to the reed cover that had been knocking all morning.
"As it's starting to warm up, I feel like maybe they'll want to be in this cover in the corner," Bennett said. "And that's maybe why the locals were saying it was such a good peg." He swapped his cut-down mugging rig into a slapping pellet rig and began landing 6 mm cell pellets within inches of the reed line — the only way to get a bite, in his read of the day.
The pattern that paid off was to slap a pellet against the reeds, watch for big brown F1s to drift out from the cover, and then mug them in the open with two dead maggots in a band on a 16 SLWG hook. By his calculations, Bennett built his weight from a slow 10 lb after two hours to nearly 100 lb across the next two hours, then kept piling on stamp fish through to the end.
Bennett kept hammering the same key lesson on snag fishing — lift, do not pull sideways. "Key to getting them out of these sticks, you got to lift upwards," he said. "If you try and pull to the side, you just seem to let the fish swim back in. So you got to pull up so that they come over the top of the reeds." On a 0.16 mainline to 0.15 hook length matched to Daiwa's Aventus black guru elastic, he reported only one hook open all match.
He fished a deliberately unfashionable rig — a former mugging rig with six number 10 shot stacked under the float, no shot down the line, fixed about 13 inches deep. "I've not fished the right rig for F1s, but it's been the best rig for doing bit of both," he said. "If I'd have had a small 2-by-10 D or something like that and a little shorter line, I'd probably have had spells where that would have been quite good and maybe better for the F1s. But then I wouldn't have been able to mug them carp in between."
By the closing hour Bennett had broken into three landing nets and was throwing a fourth in case. The shade rolled in across his peg, the F1s slowed, and he ended the match nicking carp on meat down the inside edge for the last 10 minutes. The scales settled it. "What a match that was. Fished actually better than I thought," Bennett said. "I've caught F1s to probably seven to eight pound. I've had an average stamp of F1 of probably three and a half pound — like ridiculous. Probably the biggest stamp of F1s I've ever seen. And then we've had some nice carp up to about nine pound as well. But loads of like four to six pound fish. 236 pound we've weighed."
Bennett, signing off on episode three of the series, asked viewers to chuck venue suggestions into the comments for future Unknown Venues episodes. "I'm trying to think where I haven't been. 20 odd years match fishing — there's not many I haven't been," he said. "So if you know of any venues, chuck them in the comments. Let me know of any venues that I could potentially go to."