South West Angling Regional Qualifier 2 July 08
| Twenty-six anglers travelled to Emerald Pool Fishery with a view to qualifying for the South West Regional Team. A bright, still morning suggested perfect conditions for the match but, as the weathermen predicted, this was to be followed by intermittent rain and strong winds. The top two anglers in each of three sections qualified for the team. On this venue two sections (A and B) were on Sapphire Lake and section C on Ruby Lake. As expected the match proved to be a story of two pools with the top three weights all coming from Sapphire. Mark Gaylard, Ron Stanley, Mike Poolman and Paul Gay all started the match strongly with Mark and Paul in particular catching carp quickly in the first thirty minutes on paste at four metres. Neither Paul nor Mark could maintain this momentum and were subsequently overtaken by the consistency of Mike and Ron who built up their swims by loose feeding and fishing pellet on the long pole shallow at 13 metres. This method gave them overall second and third place in the match with weights of 54lb 4ozs and 54lb respectively. Pre match favourite Gary Webber was also on Sapphire Pool. Gary started the match very slowly and after three hours had below 10lb in his net. He had however fed caster in the margins at four metres from the start of the match and this paid dividends as fish moved onto his feed in the last hour. Gary caught 17 carp in that period to finished in first place overall with a weight of 65lb 8ozs. Mike Hewitson on peg 2 adopted a similar approach with pellet as his feed and caught most of his 45lb 12ozs weight in the last 60 minutes of the match with paste as hook bait. Over on Ruby Lake Brian Chivers had the top weight of 47lb 6ozs from unfancied peg four. He caught mainly small carp throughout the match fishing the pole at seven and eleven metres with paste on the hook. Second and third on this lake was a close run affair with Mark Hollister just pipping Barry Tate with the help of some bigger fish from the margins in the last hour. Mark weighed in 32lb and Barry 31lb 2ozs. Overall results were 1) Gary Webber 65lb 8ozs, 2) Mike Poolman 54lb 4ozs, 3) Ron Stanley 54lb. Qualifiers Section A - R Stanley, M Hewitson, Section B - G Webber, M Poolman, Section C - B Chivers, M Hollister. Reserves - M Gaylard P Gay |
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