AT WL round 4 Bristol Avon,

My drive to Melksham in the morning was full of trepidation for this match as the river had been carrying extra water all week and it had been raining again overnight. I was unsure whether or not the match would be going ahead so I had also packed some big wagglers and whopper droppers so that I would have been able to spend a few hours at Shearwater wasting bait if needs be. Talk at the draw was of how high the water was and how fast, It had been deemed safe by the peggers, but they had moved a section from Melksham to Chippenham due to the Forest section being unfishable.  We all respected a 2 minute silence before the draw and then the good stuff as Barry and Dave went up to conduct the draw, It was an alright draw with number 5 being where we would be sat for the day, I was on K5 which as it turned out was around 500m from the draw venue as the crow flies. After a 2 minute drive, a 10 minute walk (I used the wrong car park!) and then another 10 minutes trying to find the peg number I was at my peg.

As you can see it didn't look too bad and I thought that with the speed of the flow and depth of water that I know is in that area that a simple match would be best, I set up a feeder rod to fish across with bread for the opening 20 minutes, a 3m whip to fish down the inside in a small slack, a flat float for 6m out just into the flow and a waggler to chuck to the far side looking for chublet and bleak if it was hard.  I mixed 4kg of groundbait and then started to check that my kit would be right for the job, it was at this point that I discovered that my 3g Flat float was woefully inadequate so I put on the biggest one I had (8g) and over shotted it by quite a bit. This was a little better and I thought that I may be able to present for a short period over the top of a baited patch so the plan stayed the same.

At the all in I potted 12 balls of groundbait onto the 6m line full of chopped worm, caster and dead pinkie (i was hoping to snag a bream on this line), a small nugget of groundbait and a few pinkies went in on the whip line and then I cast the feeder full of bread over to the far side. This time the feeder did not work and after 20 minutes I went on to the whip, this proved to be a good idea with 6 Roach and 4 Perch coming to the bank in the next 40 minutes, but the swim was slowing drastically.

I decided to rest it by having a look on the flatty and I discovered that the float was still too light and in order to be able to get the bait down I had to slowly trot the rig over the area, 5 minutes was enough to convince me that that was a no go for the day so I started casting the feeder onto the pole line. This allowed me to present a static bait at least but there were still no indications at that point. I started top rotate the swims and found that I would get a quick bite on the whip and then nothing until it had been rested for a length of time. By doing this coming into the last hour I was up to 14 fish, I was on the feeder at this point and out of the blue I missed a quick bite, I tried one more chuck in that stint to no avail, rotated the swims again and managed a small perch from the whip line then twenty minute from the end and without seeing a bite I lifted into my biggest fish of the day on the tip, a roach of about 5-6oz, and then before you knew it the all out was called. We were on scales so I got to see how the section had fished, hard is the answer with the top 2 pegs being 1&2 and both having to go for the bleak in front of them for over 4lb. There was an invisible barrier between them and the last 4 pegs as we had no bleak to show for it, I managed 2lb 5oz for third, then there was another low 2lb and the bottom 2 both had ounces.

The team on the day was 4th which keeps in 4th overall, a point behind Swindon Talisman, the goal posts have changed and we are after being best of the rest behind Garbolino Blackmore Vale and Daiwa Gordon League.