The following day it was off to Summerhayes for the open on Sellicks with 17 anglers booked in. When draw time arrived I was hoping for a peg between 16-22 and wasn’t too far off when I pulled out 24. For company I had Adie on my right while poor old Dan T on 25 was rather hemmed in without much water to go at.
I was next to Dan ‘Loads of room’ Taggert!
I set up a 0.2 gram rig for two lines at 11.5 metres and a 0.1 gram Colmic Elsa for across to the island at 14.5 metres. On the side tray were lots of maggots plus some Bait-Tech Special G F1 Dark groundbait.
On the whistle I fed groundbait and maggots on the two 11.5 metre lines and began pinging maggots across to the island. After a couple of minutes, I had a decent roach to get off to a good start but it soon became apparent that it was fishing hard and nobody was really bagging.
With two hours gone, I only had two skimmers and another roach but that was pretty good as far as I could tell. I’d been feeding across to the island and after three hours, had my first look but didn’t get the response I’d hoped for with just a couple more roach. Adie had spoken to Zooner over on peg 7 and he was admitting to 4lb which was probably winning the silvers although Nick up on 16 was starting to get a few now as well.
Dan was really struggling and both of us were hooking (and losing) our fair share of carp. I was into yet another that headed off round the point of the island so threw the pole back and got down to the top kit. Thankfully the fish came back although I was still expecting a carp and was surprised when a decent perch around 1.5lb surfaced. Things got even better when I had another not long after, this one about 12oz.
Going into the last hour, I started getting a few bites and had a nice skimmer plus some roach (along with the inevitable carp) but also pulled out of what felt like two decent skimmers and missed a few bites. At the all out, my final tally was three skimmers, two perch and seven roach (plus five carp).
I packed up and went to watch the weigh in, Dan Govier was the early leader with 29lb 13oz on peg 3 and then Zooner set the silvers bar with 8lb and I paid him my nugget. Dan Pither on peg 10 weighed 40lb 7oz and then Alex Kerr had 32lb 11oz to go into second place.
Zooner had some nice skimmers for 8lb to win the silvers
Dan Pither won on the day with 40lb 7oz from peg 10
Roy Hughes weighed 5lb 9oz of silvers on 15 before Nick had 21lb 10oz of carp and 7lb 8oz of silvers. Adie weighed 27lb 14oz and needed one more fish to frame and then I was next. I thought I’d be short with around 5-6lb but it was actually another case of close but no cigar when my silvers went 7lb 2oz and Dan ended up with four skimmers for 4lb.
1 – Dan Pither (Summerhayes) – 40lb 7oz
2 – Alex Kerr (Summerhayes) – 32lb 11oz
Silvers
1 – Jess Jordan (Summerhayes) – 8lb
2 – Nick Payne (Ilminster) – 7lb 8oz
Thanks to Dans pound the Nugget-O-Meter moved up to £437.
There’s still a great offer running if you fancy treating yourself to some new fishing gear, use the exclusive discount code AgainstMenandFish10 to get 10% off when you shop online at Somerset Angling
Also I still have copies of my book available from eBay here or Amazon here
And if you could spare five minutes to leave a nice review on Amazon, it would be very much appreciated.
Next up – Thailand
Coming soon – Lots more match reports
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