Winning tips from Lee Kerry
Cakovec Canal tests float skills to the limit
This year’s World Club Float Championships can only be described as one of my most daunting fishing challenges ever!
The venue – the Cakovec Canal in Croatia – is a four-mile-long, 80m wide, straight channel which takes water from the River Drava and pumps it through to generate hydro-electric power.
To give you an idea of the pace of the water, if you let your float run through without holding it back, it would take a mere four seconds to travel the full length of your swim.
To tackle this sort of venue we needed the right type of floats – flat floats! These were not your usual 4g-5g ones, though. The main floats used for the week’s fishing ranged from 30g to 50g!
The level also changed at times, at one point rising 30cm in less than five minutes.
EIGHT SECONDS
So how exactly do you approach this type of venue? Well, in Europe, most countries have matches along these lines. Not all the time, but running big flat floats through a swim is not alien to them. For us, it is a huge challenge, but having bagged a bronze medal in 2015 in similar conditions, our Drennan Barnsley Blacks team knew we had what it takes to be successful.
The main aim with these huge floats is to slow the hookbait down enough to give a fish the chance to take the bait.
Holding the bait still in this flow is impossible, but with 30g-40g floats, we could slow it down to around half pace. This would give us approximately eight seconds in the water, before we had to start all over again – physically demanding.
Then, of course, there is feeding. Plenty of bait needs to be fed to allow for the strong flow. The main baits we used were groundbait and maggots, but everything must be really heavy in order to make sure it goes straight down to the bottom in the strong flow.
We added lots of fine gravel to the groundbait, which was a sticky mix of Sensas Gros Gardons and River.
However, with the gravel in the groundbait it was difficult to add any live baits, so maggots were introduced to the peg separately as stickymag, once again with added gravel – at least three pints of gravel to a single pint of maggots. Imagine cupping in 40-50 balls of that every match!
We decided that because we made our feed so heavy, we could introduce it very slightly downstream, so that when the bait broke down on the bottom it would be 3m-4m down the swim. Working the float hard over this ‘killing zone’ was key to catching big fish.
A NEW PLAN
To begin the week the main target fish were vimba, which look rather like big dace. They feed in the same way too, aggressively looking for food in the flow. Vimba give very fast bites, and weighing anything from 6oz to 3lb, they are a brilliant fish to catch.
However, as the practice week progressed, fewer and fewer of them were being caught. Towards the end of the week new fish were starting to show such as bream and the odd carp.
After a really successful practice week catching vimba, the final day was very hard, and we needed a new plan.
We prepared some heavy soil, which allowed us to introduce jokers and casters into the swim. This seemed great for holding these bigger fish, but would the other teams cotton on?
The World Club Championships is held over two days. After nine days of practice, hours of preparation and even a visit to watch a match the month before, everything was now focused on these two days.
A GREAT RECORD
In four attempts at the World Club Championships in six years we have managed fourth, third, first and second – far ahead of any other nation.
It has been an incredible honour to be part of that success, with a fourth in section my lowest score – something I’m really pleased with.
A huge thanks to Drennan and Sensas for sponsoring our team, and I have no doubt the team will be fighting hard to represent our country again next year.