Jacky Leonard – 13 February 2016 – Peter Potgieter

Jacky Leonard is one of the best angling venues of the Vaal Dam, I have fished there about times and each time decent bags of fish have been caught, sadly though I have never caught a decent bag there myself. I think 8 fish is probably the most I have weighed in there.

My last two visits to the Vaal Dam have been relatively successful, personally I feel I have gained confidence in myself to finally fish competitively and hence I joined the National angling league

The previous I week I missed the angling league as my bakkie was in for repairs so this week I really wanted to fish, browsing through Facebook I saw that Hap and Kap where three of my friends are members are having a competition at Jacky Leonard so that’s where I will be fishing

On arrival I was greeted and made to feel most welcome, there were around thirty anglers in attendance. After the opening pegs were drawn, I drew Peg 7

Arriving at my Peg I could see the fishing turning in the shallows, I knew that one rod would defiantly be going in pretty short

For the first time ever I mixed 2 bowls of feed, bucket 1 was my usual mixture of Popcorn and Heavyweight Feed while bucket 2 was the same mixture but to it I added a half a bottle of ALM X Mielies the top layer of the feed was sprayed with Traction before mixing it together.

My starting combinations would be as follows, the left rod would be my 10 foot rod with the feed I mixed the mielies and Traction, each rod would have a single spookasem float and a HLX dough backing with Spookasem, Swiss and Foxtrot on the ball. This combination served me well at Moolmans recently and today I am hoping for it to work for me again. This rod was clipped at 65 meters

On the right will be my 12 foot rod I used the plain feed with a Pearl Gem backed up with a RPA Dough, on the ball I put a stripe of DCX and GTA and gave it a spray of Duiwelsdrek. This combo recently worked well for me at Draaifontein so I decided to give it another go. This rod was clipped in at 85 meters.

At 07:00 the siren went and around 60 rods were in. Just like at Moolmans by 07:15 I was butting a fish from the short rod into my net, a small carp but never the less its weighable. Just after 08:00 I landed a nice grass carp of around 2 kgs on the same combo and 20 minutes later a weighable muddy.

Finally my deeper rod got some action and I landed a grassey of 3.82 kgs

By 10:00 I had six fish four of them on the short rod but by 10:30 the fish were gone, I persisted on the same kols for an hour adding SA powder but without any luck

I then decided to move the deeper rod to 100 meters and load a vampire float on each hook with a RPA backing dough, ball dips were changed to Banana X, HLX and Yellow Navigator Spray. I moved the shorter rod to 70 meters but kept the same combination as before.

The lines were not in long when the deeper rod ran, stuck, I am not amused, this happened 3 times, I has to make a quick plan so I decided to change the rods around and fish the deeper rod on the other side

This change of plan had me back into the fish, a double up with 2 muddies and a decent size carp on the deeper rod. Catching muddies fairly regularly there after I also caught a barble on the deeper rod just before hooter giving me four species ( Mud fish, Carp, Grass Carp and Barble) for the day

In the end I finished with fourteen fish and one under size fish ( 8 Muddies, 2 Grass carp, 2 Carps and 2 Barble) weighing in at 10.80 kgs