Welcome

Match fishing blog, Keeping the float dipping online

I’ve been match fishing for over 20 years now starting out fishing club matches and later moving into fishing Commercial Opens at venues near to me throughout the Worcester area. Through these blog pages my aim is to encourage new or existing pleasure anglers into the world of competitive commercial match fishing by reading my many blogs from the venues I have fished matches on over the years.

I only get to fish generally once a week as I’m still working for a living so the pressure is really on trying to do a blog every week, but when I can I write about how the weeks match has gone. I do hope you enjoy the website especially if your a first time visitor or one of my regular returning readers. If I’m out at a venue and you see me come and have a chat or even better meet me in person for a one to one coaching session. I hope you enjoy reading my match blogs and this wets your appetite for getting into match angling.

Take a scroll through my recent blog posts

It can be difficult for the beginner or even the more experienced angler at first, but once your up and running the sport of match fishing can be very pleasurable. You will meet and learn from many friendships made from this fantastic sport. I’ve been match fishing for over 20 years now, based in Evesham, Worcestershire and have made many life long friends. Though these pages I try to give you little hints and tips in a simple way that will help newer match anglers.

These days there’s a wealth of technical information on tackle and tactics produced by many of the leading tackle companies on the internet. These are all excellent and a lot can be learnt by reading these articles. We now have social media which has plenty of great content out there to learn from and enjoy from many of the Country’s top match anglers.

Learning via Social media is the new norm

So I keep the in depth tackle and tactics for these people to post on the internet, for all to read and I include some of this content within my blogs. In effect everybody fishes the same tactic’s and methods because of all this information but the top anglers still seem to have an edge and regularly win. So it must be their thinking during matches that sets them apart from all the rest. This is my main aim in my blogs. I try to explain the decisions and changes I make during my matches. 

How it all started

When I first started fishing in the 80’s it was just pleasure fishing and this continued as an enjoyable pass time into my teens and early 20’s. I was actually too scared to enter a match in case I caught nothing. I didn’t have a close family member that was into fishing and I had to learn everything from scratch. I didn’t really know if I was doing things right or wrong and I caught very little. But I still went fishing now and again. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s there was no internet and all I could do was learn from fishing books and magazines. This probably held me back for a few years before I entered my first prober senior match in my late 20’s.

Around this time I benefited from becoming friends with an excellent local angler who got me into match fishing and got me to join a local club. At the time I didn’t even own a pole. He soon sorted me out and we began traveling together to matches for a couple of years. I learnt a lot from him during this time, but I was still very much a novice and then one day he decided to stop fishing and got onto golf.

I now had the match fishing bug but lacked anyone to learn from. So I spent several more years going to the club matches and leaning from the other anglers there. I picked up a few tips at the matches and I began reading as many fishing magazines and books as I could, even though all this information is excellent I found the best way to learn was by entering as many club matches as I could. I learn’t alot just from listening to the other anglers in the club.

The Internet became available to the masses at the end of the 90’s and I watched countless youtube videos! This basically was the way forward and I spent hours on fishing pages learning and also researching the venues I fished matches on. There came a point with the fishing magazines when I realized a lot of the methods and tactics that I had read about had began to be repeated and I stopped buying them. I guess this was because my fishing knowledge had also grown and I was now beginning to win matches on a regular basis.

These days I consider myself to be a very good angler and I have won plenty of club matches and a few opens. It took me years to reach the level I’m at now, but as an angler you never stop leaning. In recent years I have now realized social media has a big part to play in keeping up to date with modern trends and tactic’s, within the match fishing world. I continue to learn bits and pieces from other angler’s twitter and facebook pages. In fact this is a great way to interact with some of the Country’s best anglers.

If your thinking about fishing competitively its great to do and when you win that big match it makes you feel great, and fishing is really to good for your mental wellbeing. Give it a go!

The Angling Trust

I would encourage any angler to join the Angling Trust.

As an individual member. By becoming a member, you fund their work to promote angling and its future, to fight for better fish stocks in both the marine and freshwater environment and to campaign against threats to angling.

It helps protect the sport and gives us a voice. Joining the Angling Trust as an individual member includes great benefits like: 10% off at fishing venues, free £10m civil liability insurance, entry to Angling Trust member only fishing matches, member newsletters, e-updates and members only prize draws.