Bristol PSV Fishing Club: Avalon, 28 June

Only 10 of us fishing today, the Radfords, Alan Healey and Lee Waller had all opted out in favour of a fifteen peg open on Shiplate's Hawthorn lake and the other half of the match organising partnership had lost his day release pass, but then it wasn't a venue beginning with the letter "V" so no suprise there!

As Adam Caswell had been abandoned by the Shiplate Raiders and Derek wasn't fishing I volunteered to take Adam as it meant a free breakfast in Shipham which was very nice of him and it was enjoyable as ever (especially the views)

With no official match secretaries in attendance it was down to me to sort things out although there wasn't a lot of that to do as Vic had pegged it and Adam was in charge of collecting the money (he's good at that) and even I can't go wrong sorting out a payout for a 10-pegger.

The best part of it was it meant I could start when I was ready and finish when I had a fish on (as if I would really do such a thing)

Loads of room then and the last peg in the bag gave me peg 9.

That put me next to Adam on 11 (golden peg) and Brian Shanks on 7.

Matt Taynton was further down on 5 so at least I would see plenty of fish caught today, to my right at least!

Rigs today were a deepish shallow rig and a deep rig, both for banded 6's at 13m as suggested by Mr Bush and a margin rig to fish tight to the bank under a tree stump where it was still 4' deep.

And of course the obligatory pellet wag to fish with 10mm pellet which I'd picked up instead of 8mm's, due again to my dodgy eyesight, and I will hopefully be getting some free 8's in a minute from Matt Challenger by way of compensation.

(But I may be waiting a while in the shop)

No lead rod today as there's too much skill involved so best left to people who know what they're doing with that one - Giles Cochrane springs to mind.

Kicking off I dumped a pot of pellet and corn at 13m and under the tree stump and launched a few donkey chokers out to the end of the island.

Starting on the deep/ shallow rig I was getting some good silvers straight away which was a bit of a dilemma as they weren't part of the plan but I fancied I could have a good weight of them if I stuck it out but then Brian next door was catching carp from the off on the wag (casting 1.5mm from the grass) so the pole was dumped and replaced with the wag rod.

Unfortunately my casting standard isn't quite in the same league as Mr Shanks and after the first hour I was about 6:1 down to my neighbour and even Adam was ahead of me.

My 13m line was meanwhile fizziing like crazy so I had a look over it with a piece of corn on the hook and had a bream of about 3lbs straight away which sounded promising but was a false dawn as the next fish was a carp hooked in the tail that took ages to land and not much followed.

The middle of the match was a bit of a struggle spent swapping between the 13m rigs and the wag with not much success.

A first look down to the stump with corn and the float buried and an angry carp tore off and wrecked the rig in the reeds, bugger!

Rig 2 went on and angry carp 2 transferred the hook into a snag which I managed to pull out and consisted of a long length of rope connected to a length of electrical cable and was apparently the remains of a straw bale.

Carp 3 put up less of a challenge which was no suprise as it weighed about 12oz and carp 4 was a skimmer that thought it was a dolphin.

Brian had slowed by now from his hectic start to a more leisurely rate but was still a good 80lbs ahead and was having a bit of a battle with Matt Taynton on 5 who was giving him a good run for his money and getting 0.5mm closer to the island than Brian to get takes.

I went for a slightly different approach to save on floats and end tackle by filling in the open water and it worked to a degree as I had a good last hour on the wag.

The top end of the lake had done better, benifiting from the wind, winner on the day was Lionel Legge on 19 (2nd time for him off that peg) with 122-7.

It wasn't all good news as he did break his Reactolite wag rod but having seen the "tow-rope" line he uses I'm not that suprised.

Chris Szakacs was 2nd on 23 with 111-1, again mostly caught on the wag.

And the big news was that the silvers was won by Matt Challenger with a new lake match record of 61-3 (not caught on 10mm pellets) ... Well done Matt, and it even raised a smile!