Acorn on Saturday and as always I was hoping to get on the near bank, ideally peg 38 or 40 but alas, my angering of the ‘Draw Gods’ continues and fate handed me 15 on the far side. To be fair it’s not a bad area although when I drove round, the wind was straight in my chops which would make fishing and loose feeding long very difficult.
I set up rigs to fish top four, 10 metres straight out and angled to the right down the middle plus another for across to the island at 13 metres. On the whistle I big potted maggots down the middle and then fed groundbait and maggots on the other lines. Starting on the long line with a little strung out rig, I had some nice ide along with a few smaller skimmers and a pound tench to put me on around 3lb after an hour but the wind was already proving to be a nightmare.
10 metres was next and swapping between the two lines was fairly steady without really bagging, I could see Nick P over on peg 10 catching some decent skimmers although he was also hooking a few carp. I was still feeding maggots short so with 2.5 hours remaining, I had my first look as there were lots of bubbles coming up. It didn’t take long for the first bite and I started getting some big skimmers along with quite a few tench around 12oz-1lb. I only had one bigger tinca that was probably 3lb but did lose two foulhookers and came back with little green scales on the hook.
After an hour and a half of catching really well, bites tailed off and I couldn’t understand why as there were still loads of blows over the feed. I plumbed up again thinking perhaps the fish had dug the bottom out but it didn’t look any different. Now something I don’t feel I do enough of, is experiment with depths so I added an extra inch and couldn’t quite believe it when I laid the rig in and the float barely settled before going under as another tench was hooked. Surely a fluke or a one off but the rest of the match was just lovely with more skimmers, tench and ide so I started a second net to make sure I didn’t go over.
I ended up with 46 fish and didn’t want the match to end, after packing up, it took a while for the scales to reach our side as they had to weigh in the prolific island pegs where Walshy had an excellent 175lb 7oz from peg 4. Nick had 22lb 6oz of silvers, Glenn C on 13 weighed 106lb 9oz and then it was me, I chucked back the couple of carp I had and then my two nets of silvers totalled 44lb 4oz.
I had a lovely days fishing to weigh 44lb 4oz of tench, skimmers, ide and roach
Cheeky Glenn and Nick selfie
I thought I might have had a chance of winning the silvers but when I drove back round and saw Duffers waiting for the results, I knew he’d won it which he confirmed when he said he’d weighed a brilliant 56lb 14oz from peg 29.
1 – Mark Walsh (Acorn) – 175lb 7oz
2 – Rob Wiltshire (Acorn) – 134lb 6oz
3 – Lee Masey (Acorn) – 132lb 4oz
4 – Paul Faiers (Acorn) – 125lb 13oz
Silvers
Darren Duffield (Ilminster) – 56lb 14oz
£2 each from Nick P and me took the Nugget-O-Meter to £274.
There’s still a great offer running if you fancy treating yourself to some new fishing gear, use the exclusive discount code AgainstMenandFish10 to get 10% off when you shop online at Somerset Angling
Also I still have copies of my book available from eBay here or Amazon here
And if you could spare five minutes to leave a nice review on Amazon, it would be very much appreciated.
Next up – Acorn
Coming soon – Lots more match reports
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