Difficult conditions faced the competitors taking part in the Angling Trust Individual National Championship on Saturday 15th September 2012 on the River Soar at Sutton Bonington. The river was very low and clear with conditions of bright sunshine and a gusting breeze which added to the problem of tempting fish in difficult conditions. Even with the extra weapon of bloodworm and joker many competitors faced a hard day on the river bank.
At the start of the match most competitors chose either to ball in groundbait and fish maggots, or pinkies on the long pole line, or else to try chopped worm to try and tempt a few perch. And for the first hour this was quite successful for most anglers, but as time went on bites became harder to find and then it was a case of trying to catch a bonus tench using a big bait in the margins.
Top performance of the day came from Dave Petch (Van Den Eynde Quorn) who drew end peg 66. He began the match fishing pinkies over groundbait to land a kilo and a half of small roach fishing the pole at thirteen metres. Once bites stopped Dave switched to fishing worm over the margin weed and caught perch at regular intervals including four of about three hundred grams each. His final weight was 5 kilos 580 grams to give him a comprehensive and well deserved win.
Runner up was Tony Marshall (Van Den Eynde Quorn), who fished peg 32 on the reed bed. Like most anglers Tony started on maggot over groundbait to catch a few small roach and skimmers, he then switched to his favourite method of hemp on the long pole, but fish were hard to tempt and the presence of pike stopped the fish from settling. A switch to fishing the feeder towards the far bank with worm hook bait turned things in his favour with two tench and a few small perch for a total weight of 3 kilo 600 grams.
Third place went to Ed Warren (Preston Innovations) who fished peg 28 and came just short of the runner up spot with 3 kilo 450 grams. Ed’s catch consisted of some small fish caught on maggot, plus a tench of about 2 kilo caught on worm. Fourth place went to Paul Hughes (Sensas) fishing peg 6 who had the best silver fish catch of the match with 3 kilo 440 grams of roach caught on bloodworm over joker at 14 metres. In fifth place was another small fish catch boosted by a tench for Danny Ashcroft (Sensas) on peg 20 with a weight of 3 kilo 220 grams.
