Wye and bann
hit top form
AN INCREDIBLE 9,300lb of fish have been weighed in during three river festivals in a fantastic week for Britain’s runningwater anglers.
As floods raged in some areas, huge catches of silverfish dominated events on the Wye in Herefordshire and the Bann in Northern Ireland.
On the former, more than 3,800lb of roach and dace were caught during the three-day Wye Festival, each angler averaging 21lb a day. Lots of roach over 2lb were also landed.
River expert Dan Ashington went home with the trophy, but it was under-25 world No.1 Rory Jones who topped the individual catches with a thumping 97lb roach and dace on day one.
Drawing a peg on the tennis courts section, Rory was in a swim where he’s had mixed results in the past.
“I’d actually drawn the peg three times previously. I blanked twice and landed four chub on my third visit,” he said. “It can produce the goods when there’s extra water on, but then it turns into a really strange swim. It becomes a massive eddy, flowing the wrong way a lot of the time!”
Rory went with a positive approach, cupping in groundbait at 7m with hemp, caster and chopped worm – and it wasn’t long before he was into fish.
“In the first three minutes I had 6lb. It was solid with quality roach averaging two to the pound, and I also had two that would probably have totalled 5lb between them,” he said.
However, not everything went to plan for the 25-yearold recently judged the world’s best young match angler. After catching a roach a chuck for the first 70 minutes, the peg suddenly went quiet when an unwelcome guest gatecrashed the swim:
“I saw something big in the water, which at first I thought was a Labrador that somebody had allowed to swim in the river, but then the head of a huge otter popped up,” he said.
“Understandably, this really put the roach off, so I started feeding groundbait by hand to try to catch dace instead.
“It turned out to be a phenomenal day, and if it wasn’t for that otter a weight of 130lb would have been on the cards.”
Rory finished third overall, and
“It was solid with quality roach. I had two that probably weighed 5lb between them.”