Match Report

On yet another fine dry warm day 7 anglers turned up for the first match on the Arun at Watersfield. The pegging is limited as we are getting older and don’t want to walk down past the rushes. Hence anglers are asked to book in, Chris and John were lucky this time, as they did not book in, but there was room for them. This year I have aimed to fish when the tide allows the river to come up for an hour followed by the high water slack and then 2-3 hours of run off.

As the tide goes it can get muddy and it is also difficult to place the keepnet for the safety of fish – Ray had to find new way through the rushes to the water to resite his keepnet as the fish were starting to get distressed and he was going to pack in early if he could not do this. The river fished well with 3 double figure bags of good sized  roach, dace with the odd skimmer and very large gudgeon (a good sign for water quality) – certainly the best the river has fished for some time.

Interesting the top three all used different styles to catch their fish. Steve Simmonds trotted a stick float in the mint swim and had an excellent catch of roach and dace weighing 11-15-8 to win the match.

Steve Simmonds with his winning catch	Keith Hughes’s fine perch of 2lb 5oz

Vince Herringshaw was fishing the swim between trees which has limited trotting range- in fact we were thinking about leaving it out. Vince used a lollipop float on the long pole holding float back to catch 11-11-0 of roach, dace, gudgeon and skimmers to finish second.

In third place was John Williams fishing the furthest up stream swim, just below fence and used the pole and large pole float to catch roach dace and gudgeon weighing 10-12-0. John would have had more but ran out of groundbait, which he had constantly been feeding in small lots into his swim, with an hour to go.

With these catches perhaps we should try and hold more matches on the Arun although it is difficult to get the tides right.