Trophy Winners 2009/10

One or two of the bare facts first …
Vince Herringshaw has taken the major honours of Club Champion, Matchman of the season and the highest overall weight. However he has not had it all his own way and some strong performances from the likes of Keith Hughes and Rab Butler have ensured that the trophies have been spread around. We also have to mention newcomer Mark Pantling who has proved that he will be the man to look out for. New to our waters Mark has shown that he is at home on rivers, the canal and still waters and is sure to be a force to be reckoned with next season.

So how did our waters fish, as always we had one or two highlights and the inevitable low points ….
It’s probably best to get the low points out of the way first. With the weather being the prime culprit we had a fairly miserable time from January through to the beginning of March with two matches where all the anglers blanked on normally reliable venues and two matches where the total of all the anglers weights did not break a pound, and that was the two matches together not individually! There was one little ray of sunshine (although it was pouring with rain) during this period; we fished the canal in the middle of February and although the best description of the water colour was – strange – being a sort of bluey grey colour we ended up with an average of over 5lb per man. Of course when we went back to the same section a couple of weeks later and the colour was much more normal although the water was absolutely gin clear it was a completely different story and we recorded one of our aforementioned all angler blanks.

That’s enough of that let’s recall some of the good days ….
Staying on the canal but going back to our early season evening series we had three matches that produced some great weights for the canal. If you bear in mind these are just three-hour matches and we are not talking about match orientated carp puddles a total match weight of over 55lb from 6 anglers is really good going. Running alongside the Wednesday evening on the canal we had a couple of early season Sunday matches at Petworth Park and although not producing quite the catches you can get if you are there by yourself top weights were just either side of 30lb each match.

Highlight of the evening series on the Rother this year was a 20lb plus bag of fish (with not a barbel among them) taken by Rab Butler from Coultershaw.

We found that it always rains at Bethwins and although we still haven’t managed to get a carp out of the bottom lake, our catches are still confined to perch and more perch it has only made some more determined to crack it this coming season.

The canal, Hurston and Petworth Park were all reasonably reliable through the Autumn and we had a couple of little trips away to the Thames at Goring and to The Hammer Pond at Mill Farm where it was good to see one or two of the less regular anglers. Stemps and Cart produced some good weights just before Christmas and for the final match of the season we had another away day at Beeding Farm pond, which proved to be a very good fishery that we look forward to visiting next season.

On the team front …
The less said about the Rother Valley shield the better, we only actually managed to get one of the matches on the river, which was the one we hosted at Fittleworth. Both the Stedham and Rother matches had to be moved to still waters because the river was flooded, which is ironic as I have never seen the Rother lower than on the day that we fished at Fittleworth.

We had a bit of a topsy turvy season as far as Three Counties goes but despite coming absolutely rock bottom at Stemps & Cart (our home venue) we missed out on winning the league by just two points. So promotion to the A league beckons and we will be up with the big boys – probably only for a season but we will give it our best shot!

I think that sums up our last seasons match angling and as all seasons we had some highs and lows, we welcomed some new faces and probably said goodbye to one of our stalwarts of the past six or so years, we even managed to have a few laughs along the way – well quite a lot actually!

If you are interested in joining us the fixture list is in the back of your handbook and my contact details can be found here on the website or in your handbook. We look forward to hopefully welcome a few new faces for next season – see you there.