Match Report

This was the first Sunday match and we fished a new venue for us, Stanbridge View. This is a lovely venue near to Warninglid and gives every peg a feature to fish to, if needed. However several of our matchmen had fished the venue with the Sportsmans club and this enabled us to select the best pegs.

The fishery supplies all nets and has an interesting keepnet rule – all fish under 1lb in one net and fish over this size in another, with any fish over 10lb to be weighed and returned. There are a lot of little carp along with good sized bream and carp to be caught with the venue being noted for the number of big bream.

When we arrived at the venue it was chilly with a heavy mist and Glen must have regretted wearing shorts – however the mist burned off quickly and the sun came out and the day ended up sunny, dry and warm. Not ideal conditions for bream but the top two weights were mainly bream.

Steve Pentecost, who was fishing his first match with us, was very unlucky in that he weighed in 17lb but caught a carp of about 9lb which would have given him second place however he missed the keepnet with it. He used feeder and waggler set ups only and showed that perhaps matchmen are too fixated with using the pole.

Fishing Peg 20 was Phil Tubb who caught 24lb of bream and along with carp weighed in 30-4-8 to win the match. He fished the pole close to the bush on his left and used meat s bait.

Mick Greenway, fishing Peg 2 had 7lb of mainly small carp although he lost several bigger carp on the under water stumps. He started to feed the margins and expected to catch carp – however he started to catch bream and ended up with 17lb of them caught using expander pellets on the pole. In total he weighed in 24-13-0 to take second place.

In third place was Vince Herringshaw who was fishing opposite Phil and caught a 9-3-0 carp early on. This was supplemented with 10lb of small carp and another carp of 3lb to total 23-8-0. These were caught on sweet corn on the pole.