avon angling open , vidaduct fishery

33 booked in today so we had the use of cambell and lodge with 20 on cambell and 13 on lodge, with it being an any method match most still wanted a draw on cambell, so i let the gimp draw for me as he normally pulls carp pegs to waste, today was no exception, shame he still did it for himself as he got 64 which is on the monk on lodge and gave me 124 on cambell which for some reason doesnt seem to produce the same as the pegs around you, and to make it worse i had anton page on 123 and tom mangnal on 126, 2 of the most inform slayers at the mo. at least the wind was off our backs so it would be comfortable if we had any rain.
rigs today were 3 pellet jobs, a 4x14 with a 18 b960 on .14 for skimmers at 3 mtrs and a shallow and deep rig for 14 mtrs both with 16 hooks on .16, plus 2 wags one deep and 1 shallow but apart from losing a fouler on the deep rig it was a non starter so thats the end of that .
starting at 3mtrs i went off to a flying start and i reckon i had about 25lb of silvers in the shape of good skimmers and a couple of tench in the first hour, trouble was anton and tom were both on about 8 carp each both catching shallow, and once you get behind 2 anglers like that you are never likely to catch up, my only chance would be to take them out with a 16mm donkey choker and my strongest catty but i must have left the 16mm,s at home so that was never going to be an option, even the silvers option went as by the end of the first hour i could only get small roach and tiny skimmers on the banded 6mm over loosefed 4,s which is as good a method as any for the quality silvers, i had been feeding 8,s on the 14 mtr line so i went out on the shallow rig but couldnt get a sensible bite even though there was plenty of fizzing going on, out with the deep rig and 3 lost foulers i was now so far behind tom and anton a change of plan was needed, i switched to feeding 4,s quite heavily and had a good skimmer so the silvers may be back on NOT as that was the last silver i caught i ended the last couple hours fishing shallow with either a 6 or an 8 in the band and began catching reasonably well, so i ended up trying to win the section by default as anton and tom caught steadily right to the end so that was going to be first and second in the match, so it looked like a toss up between alan oram on 119 and me for the section, i reckoned i had about 120lb at the end which is still a good day even though anton was admitting to about 240lb and tom 180 but i new they had a fair bit more, it turned out anton was a bit over the 70lb limit in his first net so that was 4lb lost his next 2 nets were ok but his 4th net was well over ,in fact he had over 90lb in it meaning he lost the whole net so he ended up 2nd with 193.2 instead of 290 ish, meaning tom mangnal ended up winning with 242.12 off peg 126 mainly caught shallow,
2nd anton page 193.12 peg 123
3rd craig edmunds 162.14 peg 59 and 60 lol
4th tony rixon 138.6 peg 124
5th alan oram 126.7 peg 119
6th shawn townsend 119.9 peg 66
silvers went to shawn with 31.15
buff that pound up shrimphead
i,m running a match on wildmarsh at chilton trinity next sunday so book in at the shop if interested on 0117 9517250