Acorn Evening Open, Thursday 7th June 2018

I quite like the self enforced simplicity of these 3 hour matches, as you aren't going to win by setting up a plethora of rigs and rods, then attempt to use them all. 18 fishing tonight and it was ping pong ball 33 that I plucked from the bag.  A bridge peg, the bridge pegs used to be dominant on the venue, but the last couple of years their dominance has waned, although they are still capable of throwing up weights.

It started to rain as we were tackling up, so into the van with unused kit to keep it dry, the plan was to keep it simple 4 and 6mm pellets for across, 8mm pellets for down the edge, with a back up of some GB and worms. 3 rigs, one for tight across in about 14" of water, another rig to fish down the shelf at about 30" and one for the RH edge.  The deeper second shelf line plumbed up very uneven but I found a reasonable area, just before it shelved off to the main depth.

I usually like to start pinging across, but decided to try just potting half a dozen pellets, no bites forthcoming from doing this, so it didn't take long to pick up the catapult and that induced some action, with fish coming to the noise.  It wasn't hectic, but I put 20lb in the net in the first hour, no big fish and no issues with foulers, as there was only ever one or two fish in the feed area at one time.

I had a look on the deeper line to see if it was any better, the rig was a small homemade wire stemmed float with 3 No 10's strung out. I had a bigger fish (4lber) first put in, but from then on even with the slow fall, it was liners and foulers.  Tried the 10" rig over the top, but couldn't get any bites shallow.

I had been feeding a line short down the RH edge with 8mm pellets, so had a look at that, but the float was undisturbed by the presence of fish. On the halfway point I fed the edge next to the pallet of 32, with GB.  This was only left a short time before I dropped in over it and 3 fish in 3 put ins, that was to be it from there, no more bites, the fish at this venue are very unsettled lately, it's difficult if not impossible to get a run together, a couple from the same line before having to move seems to be the norm at the moment.

I had a barren spell from 20:00 - 20:35 where I didn't put a fish in the net, I then cupped in some GB across and went over it with a single worm hair rigged onto the rig I was using for pellet across, I had 3 fish for 15lb in the last 20 minutes of the match, by lowering the worm as tight to the bank as I could, so I was kicking myself for the tardiness of my decision making and even more so when the weigh in was finished and I was 4th and ounced out of the money..... I don't think I could have had more than double the weight from the peg to beat Kev on peg 4, but I should have been second, so only myself to blame.  Well done to those who made the right decisions!!

A nice touch after these matches are the hotdogs and cider kindly supplied by Cadbury Angling, I forgo the cider as I don't drink it, but a hotdog was welcome after sitting in the rain for virtually the whole match.