Wintle’s World of Angling

Mark Wintle, an angler for thirty-five years, is on a quest to discover and bring to you the magic of fishing. Previously heavily involved with match fishing he now fishes for the sheer fun of it. With an open and enquiring mind, each week Mark will bring to you articles on fishing different rivers, different methods and what makes rivers, and occasionally stillwaters, tick. Add to this a mixed bag of articles on catching big fish, tackle design, angling politics and a few surprises.

Are you stuck in a rut fishing the same swim every week? Do you dare to try something different and see a whole new world of angling open up? Yes? Then read Mark Wintle’s regular weekly column.

SUCCESSFUL CLUB MATCH FISHING

There are currently several magazines aimed at match anglers, yet the club match angler rarely has anything aimed at his or her level. Top match anglers like Bob Nudd, Alan Scotthorne and Steve Gardener, to name but three, write in magazines like Match Fishing and Angling Times Advanced, but the world of club match angling is far removed from their level of expertise. It’s like comparing Sunday league football with the Premier League. Rather than concentrate on techniques, tackle and bait, I am going to look at how a club match angler can gauge his own level of skill, and go about improving his results.

Just how good are you?
Many match anglers blame their lack of success on bad luck at the draw bag. In the long term, everyone must get pretty much the same proportion of good and bad pegs, and therefore it’s worth finding out whether your results are better or worse than average.

Bob Nudd in action (click for bigger picture)

Many years ago my local club entered the AT winter league for the first time, and our team captain analysed our club match results for the past five years so that he could get some idea of who could be relied upon to get good results. The basis was average position, average weight, and proportion of blanks. By the law of averages if everyone competed in a series of 20 matches, with 20 competitors, then everyone would come 1st once, 2nd once, 3rd once, etc, with an average position around 10th/11th. Similarly, if the pools were £ 5 each week, the average winnings over the series would be £ 100.

What our team captain found was that there was an amazing variation in results, and so it is with every club. Some win five or even ten times more than their share, yet others virtually never win anything. So, your first task is to figure out if you are a winner, or a loser.

Ideally, you would look at your results over several seasons but one season will do. You need to know two things for average position; the number of competitors in each match, and your position in each match. Average the number of competitors, and average your position (count blanks as last). Are you above half way? Do the same exercise on your winnings. What did the pools cost you? And how much did you win? Understand what the typical winning weights are for the club matches that you fish on your venues. You need to be careful here. If your club fishes Gold Valley, for example, it might be that twenty pounds is usually enough to make the top three. But if you make the mistake of comparing your club’s results with the Opens fished there, you could quickly become disillusioned such is the difference in standard.

It may be at this point that you discover that either you are a very big fish in a small pond winning ten times more than the law of averages would indicate, or possibly that your results suggest pools fodder. If the former then it is time to move onto the open match circuit; if the latter then either you are a rank novice or perhaps you are unsuited to match fishing. But the chances are you are ranked somewhere in the middle, in which case keep reading.

Play to your strengths but don’t run away from winning methods
Many years ago, around 1980, I realised that although I got far more pleasure out of waggler and stick float fishing I could achieve better results by feeder and pole fishing. At the time, few others even owned poles let alone knew how to use them. This gave me a tremendous advantage for I was able to develop pole and feeder skills leaving the rest of the field to try and catch up. Nowadays, it may seem the world has gone pole mad but few fish them effectively, I still reckon that at club match level a good waggler angler can often beat an average pole angler.

So the next exercise is to look at what methods you feel best at. Then compare this with the methods used by the anglers that do best on the waters you fish. Is there a mismatch here? Do you have a blind spot? It may be that the method that you prefer is the one that is most successful but others do better with it. In which case you need to spend time watching and talking to the better anglers to see how to improve your technique. Then it’s a case of practice, practice, practice. As one great sportsman (possibly Jack Nicklaus) once said, “You call me lucky? I guess the more I practice the luckier I get!”

Practice, practice, practice
Certainly, practice fishing is the time to try out different methods. Find out what won’t work. Try different hooks, lines and floats. Try playing fish in different ways. But always remember that it’s usually much easier to bag up when there aren’t loads of anglers on the bank. Ivan Marks reckoned that any weight caught in practice could be divided by four in match conditions. Some methods are notoriously effective when pleasure fishing yet difficult to get to work at all in a match. A good example is fishing with hemp and tares. Those big, shy roach rarely like the disturbance of a match to feed confidently close in, yet a quiet day mid-week can have them climbing up the rod. Conversely, the opposite is sometimes true. I’ve fished parts of the Thames mid-week and found it next to impossible to get through the bleak. In match conditions, with bait going in the river at every peg, and far more disturbance, the bleak end up scattered far and wide, and far less of a nuisance (not always though!).

Knowledge sharing, Confidence and Never Say Die
There is much to be said for pairing up with a mate so that you practice together, and fish matches together, sharing knowledge as you go. I did just this in the early nineties, when fishing for a successful winter league team. By sharing knowledge and trying out different baits, methods and feeding patterns, we were able to quickly assimilate new waters.

Like this angler, Mark developed his pole and feeder skills (click for bigger picture)

After the match, talk to those that did well. You’ll often find out much about how they caught their fish. One thing that came out of all this was to never worry about what peg you might draw, only that whatever peg you draw you are prepared to fish that peg to the best of its potential, using the right rods/pole, floats, feeders, hooks and bait.

I have fished with a number of teams over the years, and it is often the case that when every team meeting is spent working out which set of pegs is most advantageous rather than the best approach in the prevailing conditions that the team is on the slide. With politics, it’s the economy, stupid. With match fishing, it’s catching fish, stupid!

Clive Branson once described his Positive Mental Attitude to match fishing. Through practicing your fish-catching skills, and armed with the knowledge, gear and bait to do the job, you can approach each peg confidently. If it doesn’t work out on the day, learn from the mistakes but stick at it. It is true that sometimes you can be on a roll, getting in the frame every match, and utterly confident and seemly invincible; but the converse can occur with a run of bad pegs. Eventually, all will come good again but only if you can maintain or even raise your game. I’ve had both good and bad runs over the years and, in the end, we all get our fair share of the luck of the draw.

It has been said that it’s impossible to win off a bad peg. If you do then it can’t have been a bad peg. I’ve done it once in a peg so bad I could have cried, yet I scraped 6lbs of tiny bleak, dace and gudgeon out of a foot of weedy water on a day when five good chub pegs got blown out completely. I only stuck at it to see if I could get more than a pound out of it to prove the pegger wrong. On a normal day, fifteen pounds of chub should have won it. But not that day. A miracle perhaps but it proved to me that trying very hard, and enjoying it, can pay off even when the odds are stacked against you.

I have only given a brief idea about how you can improve your match results. Above all, remember it’s only a sport, so relax, make friends and enjoy it. I’m so relaxed about it nowadays that I fell off my box years ago!