Avalon 3 Day Festival, Day Two, Tuesday 11th September

After yesterday, when I didn't realise that silvers had a payout on the day and overall and my lost fish costing me a few section places, I brought gear and bait to fish for both carp and silvers again and drawing peg 11 had me thinking which to go for, I plumped for silvers, given that it a peg with good form for both skimmers and carp.

I had brought my whips today, as it is possible to catch 30lb+ of roach and rudd on a whip, but warm sunny days seem to be best for that, so maybe today wasn't the day, I still set them up, one at 3m and another at 4m, as the bigger fish seem to sit off the back of the feed and the occasional look with the longer whip can add some bonus weight to a net of whitebait.

I also set a up a feeder, a small cage, with a 2 1/2' hooklength of 0.12 and a 16 Guru F1 hook, this was a plan C if all else failed.  Three topkits completed the roost, same rigs as yesterday, a NG wire stemmed Gimp and a homemade carbon stemmed diamond, both on 0.16 with 0.12 hooklengths and 16 Guru F1 hooks.  Finally a rig to fish for any bonus roach, perch or hopefully tench that would come into the margin where I intended to feed some caster.

I fed two lines at 12m, one with GB, casters, dead maggots and a few grains of corn, the other a lot more negatively with micro pellets.  I had ten minutes on the whip and it wasn't hectic by any means, I then had a look over the long pole lines, as in my experience, the big skimmers come straight to the feed and not fishing for the soon after feeding can see them missed out on.

Well there isn't too much to say about the long pole lines, they were barren, bereft of feeding fish, I couldn't get a bite, not even on single maggot.  This was despite trying them at times throughout the day.  The casters fed into the margin only achieved carp coming in and slurping them up, I did set up another topkit, to fish paste and got two carp out, but that still didn't encourage any bonus silvers into the margins.

To try and stay in the hunt for silvers overall payout, I had to concentrate on the whip, catching small roach and rudd, it was hard work, difficult to catch more than 2 fish with put having to change depth to find them - to do the big weights of silvers on this method, ideally you need them competing shallow (top 12") or at least at a consistent depth.

I use a 14 Drennan Carp maggot hook for this sort of fishing, the size helps with hooking and swinging in fish up to 6oz.  I did drop down to a 16 fine wire hook to see o=if that made a difference, but there was no increase in bite ratio.

I had to go to the full length of the 4m whip to catch in the last hour, feeding caster with caster on the hook was best, maggot was bring very small fish and worm head resulted in far too many missed bites.

I wasn't too confident of doing well when the scales came round and my whitebait went 12.07, which was joint third in the silvers on the day and kept me in the hunt.  Match winner on the day with just over 90lb was John Newton on peg 24.