Bristol PSV Fishing Club: Landsend, Match Lake, 02 November (14 pegs)

A little late setting off this morning so breakfast at Shipham was reluctantly bypassed in favour of a sausage and bacon baguette from the Esso garage in Churchill which was still hot by the time I got to the fishery and was actually quite nice and also meant I was early for once.
Mad Mike Duckett was up and about and "on form" as usual and was offering advice based on the results from the Saturday open.
The advice mainly revolved around feeding loads of pellet as the carp were still very active and feeding in earnest.

14 fishing today so plenty of space for all. I had decided on Saturday night that I would be happy with either peg 13 (sheltered from any wind and rain) or peg 19.
Alan Healey took charge of the draw and gave me the second last ping-pong ball which gave me ....

Uncanny!

Alan had the last ball which was 18 and the golden peg, but that had been won by Ryan Radford last week so was nothing to get too excited about.
Peg 13 went the way of John Bradford although he wasn't exactly over the moon about it, and six hours (and 14 returned carp) later he was even less over the moon about it!

For company this week, by some unfortunate quirk of fate, I had another dose of the two Ronnies aka Steve O Toole on 21 and Lee Waller on 22.
With Alan on 18 only having a couple of pints of maggots for bait plus a dozen soft hookers donated by me I was confident of not getting "chip-shopped"
(maybe a little too confident)

I set up a shallow rig for the far bank, and it was shallow as the levels were still down a foot or so from normal.
A rig for on the deck at 5m for meat and a rig for the bottom of the shelf across.
I won't go into massive detail as I completely cocked it up by fishing far too confidently which resulted in a nightmare of foul-hookers across and only managed to save myself from total embarrassment with a handful of good skimmers and a couple of rouge carp from the 5m line caught on corn / soft pellet plus one good fish from the margin on meat (hooked in the pelvic fin) for a massive total of 31-8 and a proper chip shop battering!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Chris Gay had gotten off to a good start in peg 16 albeit a little unconventionally as he was catching on the tip using a "shotgun" feeder.
Darren North, next door on 15, was also getting a few using a more respectable pole approach.
And Psv's very own Clint Elliot impersonator, Brian Shanks on peg 5 was also catching across after ditching the catapult attack and switching to feeding 4mm's via a toss pot which eliminated the foul-hooking problem.
Chris Szakacs on the other hand on peg 6 had adopted a similar approach to myself and was also enjoying a lengthy catch and release program ...
He wasn't taking it too well!

Winner on the day then was Chris Gay who ended up catching mostly in the margins with worm over groundbait and dead maggots, or something like that, for a total of 129-6.
I did get a picture of Chris with his winning catch but it didn't come out too well.
I think the autofocus on my phone got a bit confused between Chris and the carp he was holding which is understandable!

Clint Shanks was second with 105-15

And his apprentice, Darren North was 3rd with a double-checked weight of 87-5.
Fourth place went to Lionel Legge who had an eventful day when he got "platformed" by a big fish which resulted in his topkit being reduced to a collection of chopsticks but he managed to get it in somehow and ended up with a respectable 79-3 from peg 3.

The Silvers pool went to Alan Healey with 22-14 followed by the Gimp who managed 17-7 of fry inbetween tackling the vermin (all 14 of them).