HOW DES SHIPP BECAME THE MASTER OF WHITE ACRES
It was the big-money trophy that everyone wanted to lift, and 2007 saw the England star kick off a winning streak
MATCH fishing’s archives are crammed with great stories, and over the years Angling Times has been on hand to bring you the lot!
Delving into our back issues, we bring you the second part of a brand-new series of Classic Matches in which one of England’s finest anglers sets out on the road to an historic big money hat-trick.
April is when festival season kicks off, and there’s no bigger or better place to head for a battle over five days of fishing than White Acres Holiday Park.
This Cornish complex has been running festivals for decades under the watchful eye of fishery boss Clint Elliott, attracting the sport’s biggest names to fish the five events held across the year. However, there’s more to the ‘Acres’ than just the festivals.
Tagged on to the Preston Innovationsbacked five-day clash is the Parkdean Masters, a special one-off winner takes all match with a £25,000 top prize. For years, this, alongside Fish O’Mania, was the only big-money match to go for and the list of winners makes for impressive reading.
One name stands head and shoulders above the rest on the rostrum, though – Des Shipp. The England ace has won the Parkdean three times to sit alongside almost 20 outright White Acres festival wins, a record that makes the jovial Bristolian one of the most feared anglers in any match at the fishery.
It all began back in 2007, just seven years after Des first wet a line at White Acres, with an exciting final on Jenny’s Lake that saw the lead change hands several times and a winning weight for Des that was just one carp in front of Steve Sanders.
It’s a funny lake
“Jenny’s Lake is a strange one, in that it gets pleasure fished a lot by holidaymakers but not a lot in match conditions. This makes the carp very scatty and hard to keep in one spot. It looks like the perfect lake on which to catch in the margins or on the short pole, but it never really seems to happen. Even
“This was a major match, one that we still want to win 13 years on”
though I drew peg 0, which is on an end bank of the lake with quite a bit of room in the margins, I wasn’t working out how I was going to spend the £25,000!”
No place for Plan B
“Fishing big-money finals is different to an open match, even though you’re aiming to do the same thing – win. The Parkdean match is only four hours long and you have to fish for carp and F1s.
“There’s no point in factoring in an hour spent trying to put a few skimmers in the net because you won’t catch enough of them. One bite from a carp could mean 15lb in the bag, so you have to be single-minded and have a solid Plan A that you don’t deviate from.”
Starting off
“With a lot of F1s in the lake, fishing shallow was going to play a big part, especially as I felt few carp would be caught in the margins. I picked a pole line at 14.5m to fish both on the bottom and up in the water for most of the match and then a margin line for at the death to try and sneak a bonus carp or two. Beginning on the deck with a banded hard 6mm pellet, the first hour saw me on track with two carp, one of around 11lb.”
Time to go shallow
“Every now and again I’d see a carp moving close to the surface and this happened over where I’d been loosefeeding a dozen 4mm pellets at 14.5m, so after an hour I picked up the shallow rig. A common mistake on this lake is to fish too deep, because the biggest carp are almost always just under the surface cruising about, so I set the rig at 12ins deep using a 7mm cube of meat.
“I picked meat because I’d caught well on it in the festival the week before and I think you get a feel for a method when you fish it for five days in a row. This final isn’t like a Fish O’Mania or Match This final where you can practise. You have to pick the tactics and hope they work! Fortunately, this did and I picked off F1s, carassio and a few carp.”
Waiting for the edge to kick in
“The reality on Jenny’s Lake when it comes to margin fishing is that you won’t catch enough fish to come back from the dead. It’s more likely that you will catch one or two at the most, so that’s what I was hoping for, and hoping it was a real kipper!
“I’d fed corn and hemp down to some reeds and, with 30 minutes to go, I saw a distinctive tail pattern from a feeding fish break the surface. Lowering the rig in with meat on the hook, the float dipped, and I was in. At 7lb it was a welcome carp but also my last fish. All I could do now was wait.”
At the scales
“I had an idea from people walking the bank that I’d caught enough to be in the race. As first to weigh, 74lb was good but I had no idea who had caught what elsewhere! I got around to Steve Sanders still in the lead, but when he pulled his first keepnet out and there was a 15lb carp in it, I thought ‘well that’s that then’. On his second weigh it was desperately close and for a moment I thought I’d lost it, but that carp of mine in the margins turned out to be the winner.”
The first of many!
“Winning the match was my first big-money title. I’d been second in the Ultimate League a few years before to win £5,000 but this was a major match, one that we all still want to win 13 years on.”
RESULT: 1 D Shipp, Preston Innovations, 75-4-0; 2 S Sanders, Preston Innovations, 70-14-0; 3 J Bradshaw, Team Mosella Garbolino, 69-2-0; 4 W Raison, Daiwa, 57-4-0; 5 G Albutt, Garbolino, 53-8-0.