Acorn Costcutter, Tuesday 24th May 2016

A chance to go fishing today, the closest and easiest option was Acorn, not my favourite venue, nothing against the fishery at all, but I do prefer an open water lake to a snake lake and I have a dreadful record here, apart from the first few times I fished it.

Traveled down with Tony Rixon and we walked round the lake at the start with Mark Bartlett to assess the pegging and state of the pallets, the aging ones Mark is going to repair /replace.  The draw tin gave me 33, a bridge peg, which is not to be sniffed at, although they are more bankers in the winter than the summer months.

I had a loan of Tony's brand new shears to trim the far bank grass, which is necessary to get tight to the bank, glad he had been shopping yesterday, as I think without them I wouldn't have got rid of the dense vegetation.  Once the gardening was done, it was onto rigs, one for pellet against the far bank mudline, this was less than 12" deep, the other area I had cleared had grass clumps stopping me getting tight in and this was about 20" deep.  I also set up a rig for the 'second shelf and a paste rig for full depth against the bridge.  Finally a margin rig to fish down to the pallet of 32, this was a decent depth tight in , but sloped off quite quickly.

I started across against the far bank and this gave me a flying start, as I put 45lb on the clicker in the first two hours and I was starting to think I would be on for a decent weight, I was feeding 4mm and a few 6mm pellets with 6mm in the band.  After two hours the wheels fell off, the bites stopped, signs of fish stopped and catching stopped, I spent the next three hours trying paste, I tried short by the bridge, margins, shallow, maggots,  chopped some worms and tried worm slop shallow, all to no avail apart from a couple of squeakers.

Going into the last hour there were a few signs of fish back on the far bank and this did produce a few more fish, but not hectic sport, frustrating really, as I guessed it wouldn't be enough to do any good, I lost a big fish at the net, but apart from that not too much went wrong, apart from the 3 hour virtually blank spell.

I did put 80.03 on the scales, which was enough for 5th and last in the money, I think this is my best weight from this venue, so maybe I won't leave it so long to come back next time.