The Angling Trust Drennan England Feeder team have finished in a respectable fifth place in Spain following one of the highest-scoring World Championships ever fished.

Ranked ninth with 50 section points after day one, Dean Barlow’s squad of Steve Ringer, Lee Kerry, Mick Vials, Will Freeman, Rob Wootton, and Adam Wakelin put in a World class performance on the second match to win the day outright.

Section wins for Adam Wakelin and Will Freeman, plus a second for Lee Kerry and fourth for Steve Ringer helped to reduce to deficit from day one and saw them card just 21 points – the best score of the entire championships.

It was enough to propel England up to fifth in the table on 71 points behind winners Team Ireland on 59, Lithuania on 60, Germany’s 62, and home nation Spain in fourth with 67.

For Ireland, there were double celebrations as Michael Buchwalder claimed the individual gold with a section third and a first. He was matched Lithuania’s Arunas Mazurkevicius on four points, but the Milton Keynes-based ace got the nod with a superior weight thanks to his 77k 140g total.

On the individual front, England’s top performers were Steve Ringer in sixth overall and Adam Wakelin who finished eighth.

Twenty-one teams of five lined up on the banks of the Guadiana River, in Merida, Spain for the two matches with signs from the practice week pointing towards big catches of carassio and carp, despite unseasonal cooler weather.

Stats from the FIPS-ed organisers show that anglers needed between 24kg and 40-plus kilos for good section points each day and a whopping 11,751 fish weighing 5,225kg were caught over the weekend.

* The Drennan England Feeder team’s next championships will be the European Feeder Cup in Kinrooi, Belgium in early October 2024 where they look to retain the title they won at Barston Lakes last Autumn.