A competitive foray #1

My personal identity as an angler has always been pretty clear to me, "I am a specimen orientated angler who could could quite easily slip into that all consuming place where the biggest fish must be caught at all costs, but choose's not to as I value all the things that this would jeopardise too much to do it". Match angling therefore doesn't hold much interest for me. Well, that was until I began doing a spot of lure fishing when young BB was born. You see the two types of competitive match fishing are very different. Traditional match fishing involves drawing a peg, pitching up in that peg with nearly all the fishing gear you own and eeking the greatest weight of fish you can out of your prescribed swim within the specified time limit. Lure match fishing instead is about catching the greatest length of predatory fish out of said prescribed area, which could be many miles within a specified time limit. The latter is much more mobile and strangely you find yourself fishing areas others have fished and failed, only for you to catch.

I have not had much opportunity to explore this interesting facet of lure fishing before apart from a single foray a couple of years ago when I was asked to fish with the England contingent for the CRT International lure friendly, which is organised to build bridges between all nationalities of anglers in the UK. This was not the experience I expected as only a few weeks prior to the event I had surgery to remove a kidney stone which left me with a stent in my water works. A stent, for those who are unaware of such evil things, is a plastic pipe which is designed to hold open pipes inside your body and thus caused in my case, urinal reflux. This is where when-ever you take a pee, urine is forced back up the pipe from your bladder to your kidney. In short this feels like Satan is raping your pee pipe. Hence my first ever lure match involved me spending the day with a non English speaking chap, peeing blood into the bushes, being in a constant cold sweat on a burning hot day and generally feeling like death. I can't even remember the fishing and can only recall curling up on the bed once home whimpering with JB looking at me very worried.

It's taken a few years to get over that experience and conveniently I have been asked if I wanted to be part of the England team for this CRT event and after agreeing I have taken a dip into the world of competitive lure fishing to get myself prepared. Luckily for me a friendly event was organized by Tusses Lure Division a few weeks prior to the CRT event which it seemed might be a good warm up so I duly singed up for it.

Now I do not wish to give full blow by blow accounts of each outing as this would be terribly boring and might serve to share info with my competitors should they read this, so all I will do is outline the events, venues, catches and results with possibly conclusions should they be needed.

Tusses Autumn Friendly

Venue = All Tusses Lure Division waters

Total length = 151cm 

Finish position = 11th place

I did myself out of a couple of points through rushing to total my score, which is a lesson learned for next time. Though this wasn't the biggest lesson taken from this match. Throughout the match I lost four small zander of around 20cm+, two small perch of maybe 10cm+ and a better perch of at least 25cm+. All of which added up an estimated 115cm, which would have taken my score to around 266cm which could have jumped me two or even three places higher into the top ten. All of these lost fish were down to exactly the same thing, poor hook ups, and when forty five percent of hooked fish are coming off something needs addressing for the next time.

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After chatting with my good fried Carl Arcus who is a very experienced in this area, it became clear a practice session was a necessity to help pin down possible fish holding spots for the up coming CRT match. With limited time though and a cut off point for practice coming in before I had a day free, I had to reorganize a few things and skive an afternoon off to get some needed time on the water before the match day.

Practice for CRT International Friendly.

Venue = LACC sections bridge 18 - 30

Total Length = 111cm (In the CRT match only the best two perch count. So 51cm would be my perch quota)

Doesn't count.

Leave well alone!

As pleasing as the practice session was with me making up 51cm perch quota that I would be very happy with during the CRT event it was terribly disappointing on the zander front. With zander quota making up at least fifty percent of the fish you can submit it is imperative that competitors catch any they can. Even more worryingly was the fact that I only encountered two tiny ones both of which let go of the lure at the surface. On a better note a change of hook pattern seems to have helped increase my conversion of hits into fish. on the Tusses event where of sixteen good hits I landed nine giving me a 56% conversion rate of hits to fish. On this practice with a different hook pattern I landed eight fish out of eleven good hits giving me a conversion of hits to fish of 73%.

After only two dedicated outings trying to build up decent match scores I am having to quickly re-educate myself to not actually look for the biggest fish as I have been for many years, but to instead look for the most prevalent fish as this give better opportunity to build length quickly. With this in mind I felt I was on the way to focusing myself to think more like a lure match angler than like a specimen angler.