Next event – Perch Challenge – from the Lake Challenge 2 series is over. Completely new experience for me. I’ve never targeted perch in Rutland so it was really tricky. The goal of the competition was to catch 9 perch as long as possible. Sounds simple but as the results shown it wasn’t easy at all.
The plan was simple – fill the card with fish over 25 cm and then try to upgrade. We quickly found big group of fish in the very deep water. Unfortunately they weren’t active. I caught two or three fish and suddenly two more boats joined, so the fish switched off completely. We tried many lures and methods and after 2 hours I had 6 fish and no more bites. Three of these fish were ok size – between 34 and 38. The rest was small. The good thing was almost nobody was catching anything, so we knew that not only we’re struggling. Actually I was 2nd at that moment. So we decided to look for another group of perch. First we went to a shallow area to catch bigger ones but we found nothing. The water was completely empty. So we decided to change the area again. It was a good decision because we caught remaining perch to fill the card but again they weren’t big (up to 30 cm). It was enough to secure the second position and get closer to the first place. Now it was the time to look for a big ones only. We switched to the searching mode.
The time was running out and we couldn’t find any big perch. All the time we were catching fish around 26-28 cm. I checked the results and there was a big surprise waiting – I was overpass not only by the third angler but Daniel Brackley jumped like 100 places and out of nowhere he was at the very top with a big margin. Wow, what a finish ! I didn’t give up but I felt it’s probably game over 😉
I end up at 4th place which I consider as a very good result. The top 3 guys were out of the reach this time and they deserved to be on the podium. Daniel caught a few big perch and completely destroyed the rest of us, David and Shaun on the other hand were very consistent and were smashing perch the whole day. Congrats again !
It’s worth to mention that the biggest perch of the competition was 48 cm monster for Rutland standards caught by Thom Hunt.
