Dave Currie's hot!

He may make a fine curry but Dave Currie fished fantastic in the Barclays National and led the Radbroke Hall team to a very convincing win by over 16lbs. Although he had caught 13 he weighed in the best bag of the day with 8 fish for 25lbs 4oz and also had the largest fish of the day at 6lb 9oz.



Fishing at Eyebrook the practice day had gone well enough and although we struggled to catch the many rising fish gorging themselves on buzzers we had a coral booby that was working well on a Di7, Di5 or fast glass. We swapped flies on the evening and while Powie gave me verbal because I only gave him 2 flies rather than twenty he was to eat his words and admit that at least mine were working.

36 anglers from across Barclays were all lined up and raring to go for the 37th Barclays National and after all the organising I was starting to relax now.


With everyone heading for the cow shed we were the only boat that pealed off and started in Sam's Dyke. Mike had two quickly and I had one and we made a good start. It then went very quiet and we headed down towards the cowshed. They by contrast had been catching well on daiwl bachs and things hadn't dried up. We muscled in and saw that Powie, Dave Currie and Paul Ravenscroft were catching consistently. We mooched about and settled behind Dave and manged another one. Mike changed to a midge tip and daiwl backs and a cast of 're verge' nylon he had. He then went and got snapped up twice and it was like cotton. I hope it's not all like that!. He changed nylon and did manage another.

I was tweaking back a tequila blob when the line was ripped out of my hand. I managed to keep control and after a hard fight I landed my best fish of the season so far a 5lb 13oz rainbow.

Powie had caught consistently in the morning and managed 7 and then after a move towards us managed to catch his eighth with only a short time to go with 7 of them on the coral booby on a midge tip. When the results were in he took the most fish trophy with 8 fish for over 22lb.

Barclaycard managed to come in well behind Radbroke but comfortably in second place and to cap it off John Clarke managed to take the best fish (not in winning bag)trophy with a 6lb 2 oz rainbow.

Overall we managed a catch return of 2.3 with 11 fish from the 81 over 4lbs. I will load up the full results in the next few days on my site www.troutfishers.com