I decided to go fish the Pro Mania hosted by Theuns on the 1st of May at Wilgedraai. I haven’t fished this venue in a long time, the last being the Trans Natal with Gauteng back in 2018. We met up at 05H30 and I noticed a couple of excellent anglers signing in. The number of anglers came up to 16, this meaning we will only have 2 zones, and because Wilgedraai is a public venue, our organizer managed to place pegs 4 to 21 (due to the fact we had social anglers camping close to where peg 1 would be placed). Once all the formalities were ironed out, I managed to pull peg 12 and effectively fishing against an end peg I knew would not be easy.
I picked up that the fish were playing extremely shallow, in some cases around 30 meters, but, I stuck to my original plan of fishing a 85m and 105m clip with my Short Range rods, simply because I had done so before at this venue. 07H00 the hooter sounds and off we go. Within the first 2 hours, I hadn’t had a bite, and everyone around me seemed to be getting fish at the extreme shallow distance of 40m – 45m. I made the call to fish my short range rod at 45 and 60
and finally the lights came on and I caught a small carp. It’s so important to watch what is happening around you and because of this I had managed to finally catch a fish. For the second time in a week, Sniper, Paint, and Kiana were my go to dips. I flooded the bomb with Super Casts Sniper and sprayed Tjop-Tjop over it on 45m and fished Paint/Kiana/Sniper on the 60m rod. My hook baits were only hard white floats on top and plain yellow hard floats on the bottom.
The 45m clip starting only producing undersize yellow fish and made the decision to move this rod to 65. Because I was so far behind in the zone, I made it my focus to consistently work a kol on 60m and 65m distances, rebaiting every 15 minutes on each rod until I start getting the tempo the pegs next to me were getting.
The hard work paid off and my tempo was consistent with 10 minutes a rod in the last 2 hours of the competition. I managed to win my zone with 18 fish 5.964 and that also secured a second place overall for the day.
I would like to thank my sponsor Super Cast and Sensation for the awesome product. Paint, Kiana, Sniper and Tjop Tjop are dips I highly recommend that your keep in your arsenal! Also the Short Range V2 rods are what dreams are made off.
Tight Lines,
Martin Delport
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