Will & Dre

The past weekend we had a club competition at the Vaal dam on the property of Kees van der Waldt. With no GPS coordinates at our disposal and the lack of information available on the internet we decided to take the road down to Trichardtsfontein dam near Secunda for a practice run and a weekend of social fishing.

Saturday started rather slowly and we had to be satisfied with only 5 fish for the day. Because of the bad weather we didn’t fish during the night and decided to start early the next morning. Sunday started much the same as the previous day and Willem suggested we target the smaller fish by applying smaller pieces of dough using a combination of banjo and kap-kap. We eventually ended the day with a total of 32 fish weighing only 5.78kg. I do however have to add that none of our neighbours caught any fish, just stressing the important difference smaller fish can make to your results during a club competition. As suggested in our previous post (The importance of accurate casting) , accurate casting in combination with the correct targeting strategy can greatly improve your success rate.

The importance of accurate casting is an aspect that is not always understood by inexperienced anglers and often the reason for unsuccessful fishing sessions. At a recent club competition I was competing against anglers with a lot more experience and really had to focus on my accuracy and bait choices.

My day started off recently well and I caught three small carp within the first few minutes, then the wind speed picked up and the bite rate slowed down. My neighbour suggested smaller hooks and I changed my dip choices from FX to garlic which seemed to do the trick. At the end of the day I weighed in a total of 11 fish with a combined weight of 5.35 kg. When the overall winner was asked about his bait choices, he simply replied with the following: “Accurate casting…”