Dean Barlow looks back on three great days spent competing in the annual Evesham Angling Festival.
The August Bank Holiday weekend is always an exciting time of the year as it’s the Evesham Festival on the Warwickshire Avon. This weekend competition has been going for well over 30 years and has been fished by the who’s who of angling.
The Saturday match was a bit of a let down when I pulled peg 53 out of the hat, a peg not normally in the open matches. Above me I had former World Champion and all round top bloke, Sean Ashby. We both caught a few fish on bloodworm, then it went dead. I tried for a big fish but only caught a perch. Sean caught three eels and some roach to win the section with 4lb 14oz. My 2lb 7oz was nowhere and, even worse, I had to give Sean the £1 side bet!
Well done to Andrew ‘Spud’ Murphy on winning the day with 12lb, which included a double-figure barbel and Lee Kerry on the runners up spot with an 8lb barbel and some small fish for 11lb.
The Wychavon Championship
Sunday’s match was the Wychavon Championship and an early draw put me on peg 6 In the town. I’ve never drawn here before but it can be good if the big roach feed, which they definitely didn’t the day before. I had Ian Didcote for company immediately below me on peg 7, so a good performance was needed today.
I plumbed up 13m of my Acolyte pole to find about 6ft of depth with a decent flow. Rigwise I chose 1.5g, 1g and 0.5g pole floats to cover all options. Size 20 Drennan Ultra Fine Pole hooks on 0.08mm Fluorocarbon finished the rigs off. I also set a waggler up to try and pinch some small chublets.
I started the match by balling in seven balls of Bait-Tech Pro Natural Dark and Extra containing about 50ml of joker and some pinkies, then cupped four balls of Terre de River soil over the top with 200ml of joker in them.
I started quite well catching small dace regularly but was a little concerned that I wasn’t catching roach while Ian was next to me. As expected, the swim started to die so I topped the swim up and had a chuck on the waggler where I caugh some chublets and dace until that died.
After 2.5 hours I had about 3lb in the net. It had been raining for some time and a line of colour came down the river so I picked the pole up again and first run down on single bloodworm I caught a roach about 12oz, then followd by a lovely specimen well over the 1lb mark!
The rest of the match was pretty much the same, picking odd quality fish up. As the scales came down Lee Kerry was leading with 8lb of eels from peg 52. My big roach went 9lb 10oz to take the lead but with Jeff Spiers on peg 1 having had two tench I wasn’t sure if it would be enough. They were small by Evesham standards and gave him a 7lb 7oz total for 3rd place. I had done it!
I was full of emotions as I packed my gear away as my Dad won the same competition in 1984, so to have the trophy back is a dream come true! I sat behind my dad that day so having my own family there watching me was a special moment. This is one match I’ve always wanted to win!
The Match Fishing Team Champs
Monday is the team match and our Team Drennan squad consisted of Wayne Swinscoe, Chris Vandervleit, Dan Varney, myself and captain Jon Arthur. Jon did the draw and pulled me out… peg 6 again! Even more funny was that Ian Didcote was on peg 7 again!
This is a team match and the team comes first so a section win or good section points was the priority this time. Obviously I fished the same tactics hoping that the big roach would feed again. I did catch a couple of big ones but generally caught some decent stamp fish throughout the day. It was totally different to how I caught them the day before; that’s how strange fishing can be!
Kamasan Starlets won the team event with Daiwa Dorking 2nd and Drennan Barnsley 3rd. Our Team Drennan squad finished a very credible 4th out of the 14 teams and behind arguably the three best teams in the country.
Individually, I won my section with 9lb 5oz and finished 2nd in the match behind my good mate Dave Harpin who had a big bream on his last cast to help him weigh 9lb 13oz!
Thanks!
So that’s another year over and one of my dreams has come true. Events like this need some organising so I’d like to thank DHP for all their hard work in making the event, also Evesham DAA for their support, all the stewards who attended and lastly to Sam Wildsmith for the thankless task of supplying us with quality bloodworm and joker every day!