Blythe Waters in red hot form

SOLIHULL’S Blythe Waters is in the headlines again after the venue’s match record was beaten for the second time in less than a month.

At the start of January, Sheldon’s Wayne Russon set tongues wagging after banging out an amazing 106-2-0 from peg 12 on Bridge Pool, the first time anyone has ever weighed in three figures at the popular British Waterways controlled Knowle water.

It wasn’t just the new match record weight that was amazing, but how he did it. Wayne caught his fish on breadpunch, fished on a waggler, a foot off the bottom!

Most thought Wayne‘s catch was a freak, with the carp very tightly shoaled in one peg for reasons unknown.

That was until venue regular Roger Atkins drew the same peg at the weekend, and fished the same way to beat the match record again with a whopping 118-6-0. Amazingly neither angler fed anything at all during the five-hour matches.

British Waterways’ bailiff, John Howse, was on hand to witness both catches. “There is nothing obviously special about the peg but there is something the carp like about it that’s for sure,” he said. “Both anglers simply fished the waggler out in open water with 6mm punch, feeding nothing at all. Any weight over 60lb is brilliant on Blythe even in summer, so for the match record to go twice in the middle of winter has left us all pretty stunned,” he added.

“You have to say that Roger did have the advantage of knowing exactly how Wayne had caught. In fact he fished two feet off the bottom from the start.”
John added that Roger’s new record weight for the water was in doubt until the last minute.

“The scales stood at just under Wayne‘s record with only one fish left to weigh in and I thought it was going to be nip and tuck,” he said.

“Then Roger pulled out his last fish and it was a whopper weighing well over 12lb!”