Acorn Costcutter, Tuesday 18th October 2016

Traveled to the fishery with Tony Rixon, so our usual putting the world to rights chat on the way down. North Westerly wind forecast and I didn't fancy having that blowing straight at me, but there was no need to worry as it never got to more than a gentle breeze all day.

Into the bag of ping pong balls and I emerge with 9.....

Simple today, 4 topkits, one for down the edges in about 15" of water, not 100% convinced the fish would come into that, but the next shelf was nearer 3' and that might be too deep.  A rig to fish banded pellet across in a similar depth which comprised a Malman Yoof and a 16 LWG on 0.14, another rig to fish the 'second' shelf, which was about 2'6", this was a HB Chump with a 0.12 and a 18 LWG with a band and rig for down the track, a new homemade diamond with a carbon stem, this had a 16 LWG on 0.12 to fish maggot.

Starting on the shallow rig across feeding 4mm pellets resulted in a motionless float, so a switch to the deeper rig on the second shelf to search the deeper water brought some indications and a fish. I started to get missed bites and some foulers.  The only way to combat this was to drag the rig slightly up the steep slope (nearer vertical than a slope) back towards the shallow shelf. This resulted in a reasonable run of fish, I had a quiet spell and fished through it , they came back OK.

About halfway through I had another quiet spell and instead of fishing through it, I decided to have a look round the peg, trying the line down the track, this produced a little gold fish, an F1 and then I hooked a decent skimmer that leapt out and off the hook.  That was that, I had fed the LH edge from an hour in and tried that - biteless.  Whilst I had been rotating round these lines I had been feeding across, and went back over it, had another fish about 5lb and that was that, the fish seemed to have gone, no more bites or liners.

Paul Nichols had come and sat behind me for a few minutes and told me there was a shelf at topkit + 1 to my right, fishing in line with peg 5.  I set up a rig for this and fed it for a couple of hours, but never had a bite on it.  My only hope was the RH edge, which I fed at 6 sections of pole where there is a wide shelf.  This never really kicked on, I had some obvious water movement and vortexes, but it appeared to be just 1 or 2 fish at a time coming into the peg - the usual situation when that happens wait and wait for the fish to get to the bait and then it touches the line or something spooks it and it bow waves out of the peg.  I managed 4 and lost one that was just touching double figures from that edge, not at all convinced I got the feeding right so that probably cost me, as I could see that Tony was catching well towards the end, whereas  I had the majority of my weight in the first 3 hours.

I had 3 nets in at the end, but purely in fear of the strict 70lb net limit, as I had stopped two nets at 50lb, although I couldn't remember clicking an 8lber, so think I may have clicked it twice to be on the safe side, as having no tolerance on the net limit is pretty draconian.

The scales gave me 108.09 which was only enough for 3rd on the day and reflection on how I could and should have got more from the margin ant the end.  Dave Wride won from 24 with 144lb and Tony 1 fish behind him from 31 with 141lb.