MATCH FISHING NEWS
Power Does It Again
The Unstoppable Power!
Preston ace Andy Power has won more in the past two months than most anglers win in a lifetime. The South West rod has hit an unbelievable run of form lately.
Qualifying for the Fishomania last month at Woodlands View Fishery was a great way to kick off his 2016 campaign. Well, he's only gone and qualified for the Match This Final, at Lindholme Lakes last week.
Qualifying for two of the biggest money matches in commercial fishing is an incredible feat and one that most anglers can only dream of. Well, Andy Power is a bit special, he's not he has recently won the first round of the highly contested UK Championships, again at Lindholme Lakes.
Andy gave us a run down of his two amazing matches at the Doncaster bagging mecca, Lindholme Lakes.
Match This Qualifier
On Sunday I drew peg 20 on Beeches lake, which happened to be next to a peg I drew in a Fish’o’mania qualifier last year. In that match I lost a silly amount of fish due to the underwater snags the lake is renowned for. With that in mind I knew that strong tackle was a must. The peg features an island 16m away with overhanging trees and brambles, as well as margins with fallen trees and snags galore!
I started the match pinging 6mm fishery pellets across to the island, and had a really good run of carp, as the match went on I felt things start to fade so started a new line just two meters to the side and had a really quick run halfway through. The word on the bank was that the fishery was fishing hard, and that Steve Openshaw next door on 21 and myself were amongst the front runners.
Steve was starting to get regular bites down his margin, whilst my island swim was starting to slow again, so I too tried my margin and managed 3 carp down to a fallen tree but it was really wasn’t quick enough to keep up with Steve. I decided to change my island swim approach by using a
Soft CAD Pot to try and concentrate the fish. This worked a treat and in the last hour I really started to motor and pull ahead.
It turned out the fishery did fish hard due to the unseasonably cold weather, I weighed 128lb which was enough to win, ahead of Steve who weighed 88lb. After lots of travelling I am over the moon that it is all paying off!
UK Championships
Back to
Lindholme for the
UK Champs, I found myself on peg 10 on
Strip lake, which is 3 pegs out from a corner. It’s a lake I have only fished once before, but decided to keep thing simple again by fishing pellets 14m in the open water,
Sonubaits F1 Corn short at 5m, and the margins again with corn. I started off by
CAD potting 4mm fishery pellets at 14m and started well with 3 quick F1s in as many drops.
Sonubaits F1 Corn plays a massive part in Andy's commercial attack
The wind soon made things difficult and made it really hard work to fish long properly. Those with the wind off their backs could present and feed properly and really started to pull away.
Three hours into the match I honestly thought I was last in the section with only half a dozen fish, I knew that my margins were my only hope of gaining back decent points. I started potting in corn quite heavily, regularly, and I chose to fish the margins for the remainder of the match. To my amazement I started to catch big fish from 8 to ten pounds, much bigger than anything I had seen get caught. My margin rig again featured a Dura Plus 6 4x12 float, with 13 Hollo, 0.19mm Reflo mainline to a 0.13mm Power hooklength and a size 16 PR456.
The last two hours really changed my match around, and I was now in a good position to win the section. As the scales came I had no idea what I had, and was amazed to weigh 61 Kilo, enough to win the match, after coming close to winning a UK Champs round several times it was great to finally win one.
We'll be keeping an eye on 'The Power' to see if he can add some more titles to his outstanding CV.
