Acorn Fishery – Open – 16th August 2025

With Foxy away for this one, the reins were handed to his glamourous assistants, Paul and Glenn, who did an admirable job in his absence. The draw was announced and I pulled out 19 on the far side, an area I seem to frequent a lot, it wouldn’t have been my first choice but still a decent peg for silvers.

On the whistle I started across at 11.5 metres and it took a little while to get a bite which of course I missed, not long after I had a nice big 2lb leaper and began getting the odd ide. To be honest I probably spent too long over and it never really got going, so after 45 mins, I came back on the 10 metre groundbait line and had some more ide, the odd skimmer and two tench. I’d also fed a line at the same distance but down the middle to my right with caster and was hoping to swap between the two swims but I wasn’t getting many bites there at all. I did hook one fish which I was sure was a decent tench as a mass of bubbles came up but it went to ground and the hook came back with loads of crap on it.

With around 2.5 hours remaining I dropped in on the short line (top kit plus one) where I’d been feeding maggots since the start and it was brilliant, lots of ide plus skimmers and tench to 3lb. Although the net limit is 40lb, there’s no leeway so I start a new one when I think I’ve got 25lb to be on the safe side. With three quarters of an hour left, I chucked back two carp in my third net to use it for silvers but it slowed up a bit and I only had a couple of ide, two skimmers and a tench. I finished up with 81 fish and had only hooked a few carp all match, just a lovely days fishing.

It took a while for the scales to get round to us as there had been the usual big weights of carp, Paul Faiers next door has been the man to beat recently and his blistering run of form continued when he plonked 197lb on the scales although that was only good enough for fourth on the day. My second and third nets went 29lb between them before my first net added 31lb+ to give me a total of 60lb 5oz.

1 – Glenn Calvert (Sensas 88) – 239lb 14oz
2 – Keith Ray (Acorn) – 211lb 15oz
3 – Kev Perry (Sensas 88) – 201lb 6oz
4 – Paul Faiers (Sensas 88) – 197lb

Silvers
Jamie Rich (Bait-Tech/Colmic) – 60lb 5oz

I had a nice pick up of £65 for winning the silvers and the fishing is just amazing, the ide are packing on weight and I had some approaching 1.5lb today.

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