acorn speci lake

owners son mark bartlett suggested we have a match on the speci lake , and with viaduct being a bit close to the glasto festival site people werent to keen to risk the traffic , even with the oky koky anglers booking in and out i still managed to fill the 16 pegs on offer, but with roger andoniou turning up on speck we had 17 but there is a spare peg in front of the cafe so there was no problem. everyone fancied a draw on the front bank as the wind was blowing in to it and we all thought the fish would probadly be following it so when dean drew peg 12 for me which was on the far side in flat water i thougth my chances of winning had all but dissapeared but with the lake being a bit of an unknowner as there are few matches held on it , you never know. there was a clevedon club match on it at the weekend and andy hembrow won that with 85lb on the spare peg on poled pellet down the edge and a lot of the other anglers gaught carp with a fair few being taken on the method feeder but with this being a float only match at the request of mark,as he thought it would fair it up.
the lake has a reasonable head of 4 to the pound skimmers so i intended to target them so at least i would be getting bites. i did set up a margin rig for meat and corn but the wind which was by now gale force blowing the marginal reeds over i couldnt see up the edge and when i could i never had a bite so no more of that then, i also set up a wag to fish pellet on the deck halfway to the island but that only produced one bite from a 6oz carp so no more of that then,
i set up a 4x16 j15 float with a size 18 6313 rig for the skimmers with most of the shot 15 inches from the hook and 2x10,s 4 inches from the hook so the lifters would be easy to spot, at the start i cupped in 8 balls at 13 mtrs then had 30 mins on the wag to no avail, dropping in on the pole i wouldnt say it was hectic but there were enough bites to keep the interest going , but they needed feeding as they would drift away but they would come back after each ball, to be fair i dont think i took enough groundbait, i put in 2kg but i think 3 would have been better as towards the last hour i ran out and the last 45 mins i was skimmerless i did try putting some caster and dead mags in but all that did was to prevent my bait getting to the bottom as a tiny rudd stopped it on the way down.
the only person i could see who had taken any carp was jason radford on peg 3 who had 5 on paste in his left hand margin for 26.10 and first on the day
2nd went to steve kedge on peg 15 with 25.12 which included top silvers with 25lb of small skimmers and perch
3rd mark bartlett 21.5 peg 16
4th t rixon 19.10 peg 12 my silvers went 18.6 to give me the silvers by default
5th r fogg 15.13 peg 4
6th m alexander 13.8 peg 13
i think we will have another match there but it will be any method as there were a lot of fish on the islands and they appeared to want to stay there