The Blagdon Fly Fishers ran out team winners

As I reported last week, the event in which I am involved reached its climax this weekend – I have to get my report to the editor by Friday, hence the Peregrine/Nomad results will be available next week.The Tightlines/Airflo competition has also reached its conclusion as regards the qualifying stages. The report from the final will be with you as soon as the organisers get it to me. The Hardy final comes up later and I hope to report on that event. The competition that most of the competition anglers want to do well in is the National qualifier, leading up to the National – which in turn leads to anglers representing their country. The National Final takes place this coming Saturday at Grafham, so I will bring you news of how that went too.I have reported on the Airflo Classic 2000 – an event for small Stillwater anglers. I recently received Tony O’Dowd’s summaries of the final two qualifying events for this competition. These were the two southern region matches, so I will bring you up to date.The penultimate venue was Langford Fisheries, a complex just outside Salisbury. I have fished at this fishery a couple of times and enjoyed my time there. For those anglers interested in river fishing, Paul Knight the owner, has the fishing rights to some excellent water on the Wylie which runs alongside. My friends – The Blagdon Fly Fishers ran out team winners – for this event they comprised; Andrew Hedger, Ken Logan and Mark Miles. Blagdon managed to catch 16 trout between them and this constituted a great effort on a bright day when rod averages were two fish per angler. Individual winner was top trout competition angler Tony Curtis from Peterborough. Tony caught eight fish throughout the day. Second was John Neave of Winchester, and third was PETER Neave of Winchester.The very last regional final was held at Innis fishery. This is a venue that I must visit as many of our Chew Valley regulars tell me about how wonderful this small fishery is. I will make that one of my New Year resolutions! Again this event was dogged by hot weather and cloudless skies! With a rod average of less than 2 fish per angler, you might guess that the fishing was tough! Top team were the Devon Dollies – comprising Keith Bryant, Mike Phipps and Mike Pusey. Mike Phipps was the overall top rod with eight trout coming to his net. He managed to catch four of those fish by 10.35, so he couldn’t have had a much better start.On the individual front, Paul Roach was the winner. I will come back to Paul later. Local angler Mark Kitchingham of St. Austell came second and the last qualifier for the final was Jeremy Summers of Exeter.I had the pleasure of a day with Paul Roach in my last outing to Chew. We fished together as we had both won our way through to the “quarter-finals” of the B.R.F.F.A. knockout competition. On a tough day Paul, who apparently is an ardent nymph/lure angler, struggled as the fish were very high in the water. To me it seemed that dries were going to be the “percentage” method – I am not one to moan about that! Paul occasionally had a go with dries, but he wasn’t too convinced. As a result, when the fish did move – only when the cloud cover arrived in the last hour and a half – Paul wasn’t too sure about putting the dries on. After struggling for much of the day for only a couple of trout, I caught steadily from three o’clock onwards and ended up with eight trout. Paul did eventually land a couple of fish – on dries! I wish him better success in the Classic final, which will be held at Bushyleaze on Sunday 1st October. I go on to fish local top rod Tony Baldwin. That is all for this week. Look out for all of the reports on the finals coming up here in my weekly article.

Tight lines,