Acorn Fishery – Open – 26th July 2025

On Saturday it was up to Clevedon for Foxy’s open at Acorn with a great turnout of 25 fishing and after getting some bait, paying pools etc, it was soon time to pray to the God Of Good Swims (or GOGS for short!). Despite my prayers and even employing the ‘hanging back’ technique, neither worked as once again peg 38 avoided my clutches. I wasn’t too disappointed with number 23 on the far bank though, it’s between the concrete bridges and normally a decent area (an empty peg either side couldn’t hurt either!).

Chris got us up and running and I fed a 10 metre line straight out with a nugget of groundbait, down the middle to the right with half a pot of casters and then top kit plus one with gb and maggots. I kicked off across at 11.5 metres, pinging maggots but didn’t have the best of starts, I missed a few bites before hooking a decent skimmer that came off, then as I went to ship out, there was a roach on briefly but that fell off! The next bite resulted in a carp (which wasn’t hooked in the mouth) going berserk before coming off and I eventually got off the mark with what I thought was a little tench but turned out to be a foul hooked 4oz eel!

So with half an hour gone and very little in the net, I came in on the 10 metre line which was fizzing like a jacuzzi and finally started putting a few fish in the net, ide, the odd tench and a skimmer. Duffers was on the other side of the bridge (peg 21) and catching roach and ide but also hooking quite a few carp. Swapping between the 10 metre line and down the middle with caster, I’ve caught quite well for 3.5 hours but also pulled out of a few fish.

I’d been feeding maggots on the short line from the start and with just over two hours left, had my first look and it was really good with lots of ide, quite a few tench to 3lb, a couple of skimmers and a cracking roach that was knocking on a pound. When I thought I had 25lb, I started my second silvers net, I did have a big leaper come off but I wasn’t having too many carp problems and didn’t want the match to end.

With just five mins remaining, I foul hooked a carp that gave me the runaround before I landed it and looking at my watch there were only seconds left, so I checked the maggots were ok and shipped out without filling the toss pot. The rig settled and went straight under, I struck into a fish that I knew was a tench as bubbles fizzed up everywhere, the whistle went so I took my time and netted a lovely 2lb fish to finish off a really enjoyable match.

I ended up with 60 fish and thought I had somewhere in the region of 40lb but to stand any chance, I’d need to beat Paul Faiers who’d drawn 38 and said he would be fishing for silvers. The scales started round the other side and as they worked their way round to us, I went to have a look at the board, as expected Paul had weighed an excellent 59lb 4oz but Neil Morgan on 29 was close behind with 56lb 10oz of silvers. Matt Hamilton on my left had 145lb 7oz and then my second net went 22lb+ which was a bit more than I thought and my first net weighed just over 30lb for a 52lb 10oz total, so I was only a couple of fish short in the end (a recurring theme at the moment!). Duffers was close to his 20lb estimate with 24lb 7oz which included lots of smaller roach.

1 – Bob Gullick (Acorn) – 262lb 4oz
2 – Glenn Calvert (Sensas 88) – 234lb 14oz
3 – Nick Chedzoy (Acorn) – 231lb 3oz
4 – Jeremy Salisbury (Acorn) – 190lb 10oz

Silvers
Paul Faiers (Acorn) – 59lb 4oz

Back at the results and Bob Gullick led a string of big weights on the day with a mammoth 262lb 4oz of mainly carp from peg 34, Paul won the silvers and it’s a rare occurrence when he doesn’t feature in the frame. I had a lovely days fishing and Acorn are hosting quite a few big silvers qualifiers throughout the winter and I’ll try and fish as many as I can.

Nick P very generously donated £5 and along with £2 from me, the Nugget-O-Meter climbed to £462.

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