Report from £10k NuFish final
Just 2oz between first and second...
IT looks as though 2019 is on course to be just as successful a year for lee kerry as the preceding 12 months.
The preston innovations man has added the successful defence of his nufish feeder King title to the feedermasters crown he won just a couple of weeks earlier.
in a match held on a tough southfield reservoirs, just nine fish were enough for england feeder team man lee to retain the trophy and bag the £10,000 cheque – but it was in doubt right up until the weigh-in. his 15-10-0 net ended the day just 2oz clear of roger edmund.
That meant the runner-up from hull had to settle for the £3,000 second prize, mac stephens taking third and £2,000 with 11-14-0 on a day that saw the bream and skimmers of the yorkshire water playing hard to get and bites at a premium.
“i honestly didn’t think i’d got enough to beat roger,” said lee, who was second-from-last to weigh in.
“i lifted my fish out in the net and thought perhaps i had 14lb so was very concerned and had kind of admitted defeat. But you never quite know, and when the scales settled on 15-10-0 before bouncing, i knew i’d done it.
“The wining margin was nothing, so small, and you’ve got to feel for roger. we’ve all been on the end of losing out by small margins but it’s more painful when there’s £10,000 to win.”
early success
lee drew peg 31, an area that had some recent form. But at southfield you never quite know where the fish will be. That said, it looked good for the champ with a big skimmer on his first cast, followed by a three-fish burst after an hour, including a 3lb bream.
“you tend to get what we call ‘visits’ from the fish, a little run of two or three and then nothing, so i expected it to go hard after that opening hour and it did,” lee said. “it soon became obvious the lake was fishing very hard and anything you could do to get a bite would count, so i had to work at it, changing baits, length of hooklinks, size of feeders and what i’ve put in the feeder just to try and find what the fish wanted each time.”
Three lines went in at 50m, 30m and 15m with only one fish coming off the 30m line.
The rest of lee’s catch came on the long chuck, where he fished a 45g preston innovations window feeder and a 60cm hooklink of 0.14mm line to a size 14 n30 hook.
“on some casts i’d put just a tiny trace of chopped worm in the feeder, on others just a couple of dead maggots and on yet more just groundbait. how long the feeder was out changed a lot, going from five-minute casts to leaving the bait there for 15 minutes to try and bore
one out. The best bait was two redworms, but sometimes halves got a bite when a full worm didn’t,” lee continued.
“southfield is very much a ‘working’ water where making alterations all the time pays off. it’s not a place to sit and wait, so
it was hard work, but it just went my way in the end and that’s always satisfying when you feel you’ve put in the effort. Even so, I still didn’t think I’d won!”
For Roger, on peg 44, his match followed a similar pattern with small bursts of fish on feeder and worm – although with 30 minutes remaining, he reckoned on being around 3lb behind Lee.
A missed bite left him cursing, but on the next cast a 3lb bream was netted to pull him right up into contention and possibly into the lead.
One more fish would seal it but that pull on the tip never came to leave him, like most of the field and the spectators, guessing until the scales finally told that dramatic tale.
Result: 1 L Kerry, Preston Innovations, 15-10-0;
2 R Edmund, Hull, 15-8-0; 3 M Stephens, NuFish,
“Anything you could do to get a bite would count, so I had to work at it”
11-14-0; 4 M Godfrey, Guru/Mainline Match, 10-8-0; 5 S Whitfield, Cadence/Nufish/SonuBaits, 10-2-0.