The Bloggers meet on the Avon

Saturday 30th July

After a hectic morning cramming all the last minute bits in the car, I finally dropped off my kids at Mom and Dads and headed to Harvington's Anchor Meadow to meet up with the other midlands bloggers.

I finally arrived about 3pm and after a little hiccup in finding the campsite I eventually met Steve and Gary setting up their camp. I ditched the car and headed to the river to find the rest of the bloggers already fishing with a few  reports of small barbel and chub landed so far.

Not long after I'd arrived Andy managed to catch a 6lb Pike then followed it up shortly after with this nice 12lber.

and the winner of the biggest fish is ...

I set up my tent....well it set itself up really.  I'd bought a new argos pop up job, which sprang out of the bag and was all ready to peg down. Well worth the £20 and very snug too, but I think 2 man is stretching it  a bit though, more like one & a half man, but being a short arse I fitted it a treat.

"compact and bijou"

The fishing was pretty slow for all and I found it hard to get motivated once the cans of beer were flowing, in fact I was just as happy chinwagging with the others rather than wet a line.  My plan was to fish for Barbel and zander from evening so after a few hours I'd just caught a few bleak ready for the zed fishing later.

Keith, who'd arrived a little while after me suggested that we venture across the weir to the pub, so off came the shoes and socks and we waded across.
In the pub the landlord was not the most welcoming of sorts, and after two quick pints laced with strong hints to basically just go away from the owner, we left him to ponder his pretentious and no doubt overpriced menus whilst waiting for his empty covers to be filled ( lol), .. what a tosser.

Jeff prepares to join Keith and Martin for some extreme fish spotting !

We crossed back over the weir to find that Joe Chatterton had turned up too. After we'd all introduced ourselves, I decided to head off to get ready for the evenings fishing.

I fished a barbel and a zed rod but the only action after an hour was this small bream.

After a while I headed back over to Danny and Andy's camp on the point of the island so I could get some food cooked. David was in the next swim and had a nice BBQ going, he kindly let me use it to rustle up a sausage sandwich as I'd managed to bring an empty gas bottle for my stove .. doh!  After eating and more drinking I never made it back to my swim, in fact my fishing for the weekend finished there. I ended up sinking a few more cans and chatting with the lads before heading to my tent about 1:00 am (I think?)

I woke about 6:00 and headed back over to the lads but never managed to get the rods back out.  It was soon time for breakfast so I pooled my resources together with Danny and Andy who cooked up a breakfast fit for a king on their cookers, washed down with plenty of tea.  Sometime during the morning Dave caught a little Barbel, the only one I saw all weekend, then we all slowly started packing up and heading home except of course for Jeff whose better half was meeting up with him to stay for a few more days.

It was a great weekend, not for all the fish caught of course but certainly for the craic and the chance to meet up with all the lads. I'll look forward to the next one, and maybe I'll even get some fishing done as well ?