Inside fishing history
Angling historian Keith recalls a pivotal moment in match fishing, when a carbon pole dominated the world championships
THE 1980 World Freshwater Championships was a watershed moment in match angling. It was won by the German angler Wolf Kremkus using a revolutionary new carbon pole and a float described to me at the time as ‘like a ping-pong ball with a lolly-stick through it’.
The pole was the original Daiwa Pro-Carbon – at 10m long and with put-over joints, it was incredibly strong and until relatively recently was still the go-to pole for long-line ‘bagging’ in Ireland and Denmark. The event was fished on the River Neckar in Germany, close to the confluence with the Rhine near Mannheim, and while the World Champs was often won by teams concentrating on big numbers of small fish, Kremkus caught proper bream and roach.
He used pole floats that carried 5g and upwards, unheard of at the time here in the UK where pole fishing was still seen as a light-line style of fishing.
He weighed in 16.990kg — almost 37.5lb — an individual record that stood until 1997 when our own Alan Scotthorne took nearly 20kg from Lake Vellence in Hungary.
The German team obviously had the method sorted out because they had four section winners and a third from their five-man team. England were a distant second on 23 points, pipping Belgium by just a point, helped by a good result from that man Kevin Ashurst.
And then, to prove it wasn’t a one-off, Kremkus became champion again in 1983, with two wins for Englishmen in between – Dave Thomas on a fast and rising Warks Avon and Kevin Ashurst on a dour Newry Canal in Northern Ireland.
This was a time when British match fishing success really kicked off, with several team and individual medals of all colours coming our way.
I’ll be looking at some of those in future Archives… and it’s not all England either!
“Winner Wolf Kremkus caught proper bream and roach”