Winter League Final 2009

What a year!!!! that’s all I can say about 2009 so far. Ive fished loads of matches this summer and some pretty big ones too, so ill take this opportunity to catch up with everything ive been getting up to in the world of match fishing.
This year was my first opportunity to fish on the river nene in the angling times team champs final for my maver Barnsley team, now my only experience of the nene before this was a junior national back when I was a young un and I actually came 4th so least I had a bit of form we decided to spend 4 days practicing and I have to say these where brilliant and we worked really well as a team and got bang on the methods needed for the different sections, I managed to snare the top weight in one practice with a near 13lb mixed bag but due to my inexperience on the river I didn’t expect to make the team, so was overjoyed when the team was announced and I was in it!!!!!
Come the weekend and a day spent with lee kerry sorting out all our gear was brilliant and got us both ready for the big day on the Sunday. Come the Sunday and me and ian bowman travelled down to Peterborough ready for a ground bait mix-a-thon, I drew the middlehome section roughly halfway down, I had one of Barnsley’s latest recruits james dent helping me out for the day and I was glad he was with me. On arrival to my peg I was greeted with the masses of weed that was such a problem on the river luckily I had manufactured a bit of a weed rake which was an essential bit of kit. I had mark downes two pegs to my left and jonny Arthur two to my right and also steve hemmingray in my section so I would definatly have my work cut out to score good points. Anyway I must have thrown the cutter in 50 times to try and clean the peg and I think it did some good. The river was proper gin clear and what was interesting was that when u stirred the silt up you could see small fish milling about in the silt so I can only imagine bigger fish will be the same further out, so it definitely does no harm!!! With an 11 o clock start looming myself and the rest of the section where really struggling to get set up in time, luckily for me james sorted my ground bait and helped out, id have been no where near ready had it not been for him, thanks sir.
At the all in I put the pole in the rests and proceeded to ‘fill’ it in however a freak gust almost blew my box in and put a halt to everyones balling in as everyone clambered to grab bits of tackle that had been blown in!!!!! at the start I caught small fish straight away close in and was managing to sneak the odd better one on a tiny bit of red worm also, after 2 hours I was doing ok but not brilliant but knew id catch some roach on the long line later on. By the third hour jonny Arthur was extracting big time!!!!! So I knew I needed to make a move and I was soon catching roach. I did have a few problems with hooked fish catching the weed when I was shipping back and breaking my hook lengths but I plodded on till the end and james said id done well in the section. Come the weigh in and steve hemmingray had, had 3lb and mark downes had a bit more so I was well chuffed with my 5lb 10oz and was leading the section untill jon weighed in and he plonked nearly 16lb on the scales for a well deserved section and match win!!!! I ended up 4th in the 16peg section and was dead chuffed with that, we saw alan scotthorne on the walk back and he was second in his section so these where two good scores.
Back at the draw and it was apparent that we had a good match, but not good enough!!!! Our score was only good enough for second behind an awesome Shakespeare superteam performance and it was nice to see some lads who put a lot of time in get the rewards!!! Well done boys. We where slightly disappointed with second but we had, had a good team performance and certainly made our practice worthwhile. Hopefully with next years final being moved to later in the year the weed might have died back a bit and it will be a proper fishing match again!!!!