Norms Bagging Open, Acorn, Saturday 17th August 2019

With the weather forecast set reasonably fair, I was hopeful of a good day at Acorn, Norm's opens have an optional silvers superpool, but I declined that and had come to focus on carp.

Can't complain about my draw, peg 11, it did have the wind pushing fairly hard from right to left, but it's not a long reach across, so it should be OK.  The downside of this peg in the summer, is the depth of both margins, but I was sure I'd catch across, shallow and short, sadly my optimism (yes, optimism) was not to be bourn out.

Plumbing across, where there is a nice shelf, fish were obviously present and I started over there, pinging plain 6mm feed pellets and same in the band.  Two fish for 7lb in the first two put in's and I was thinking it could be a good day.  Well that's optimism for you, I'll be ditching it and going back to my usual pessimistic state, as I never had  another bite for 75 minutes.

Finally had a couple shallow, fishing to the corner of the island, but that was that, another 2 hours passed without a bite, before I finally put 4 or 5 fish together, pinging 6mm Polony pellets down to the tree and slapping over the feed.  This was a short burst of fish and apart from one more which hung itself on a white wafter, when I chucked the method out - in desperation - that was it.

I hooked one fish in the margin down to my left, and before I could react, it was into the tree and snagged solid, disappointing day and around 3 o'clock I did wonder if the day might be better spent, but I did stick it out and ended up with 44lb on my clicker, which went 46.07 on the scales for a resounding nowhere.