The rain came down to brighten anglers' moods

Chris Donegan • Published 12 May 2011 13:00 0 Comments

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Classic anglers look to the skies

Anglers' prayers were answered when the rain came in the nick of time for the start of the £30,000 Waterways Ireland Classic Fishing Festival.

Some of them will be back on their knees tomorrow (Friday) morning, begging to draw a lucky peg with plenty of fish for the final match in the hope of snatching the top prize of £5,000.

Others among the 253 anglers taking part in the three-day event, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, will have looked at their results from the first two matches and resigned themselves to the fact that, even with divine intervention, 2011 is not going to be their year.

Faced with abnormally bright and sunny weather and disappointing catches in the run-up to the Classic the organisers decided to take a bit of a gamble, dropping several of the best fishing spots of previous years and replacing them with places that have never featured in the Classic before.

Trory was one of the sections that got the chop.

"People would have killed to fish Trory 20 years ago," said Fermanagh District Council tourism officer and Classic organiser, Eddie McGovern.

This year they would have died if they had drawn a peg there.

Trory was replaced with Lough Macnean where catches on Monday weren't exactly headline grabbing with a top weight of just over 10 kilos.

Ely Lodge survived the chop and produced double that.

Mr. McGovern said the recent rain "obviously helped a bit" but when the sun comes out the fish run and hide.

"We are looking for deep water," he explained.

The new venue that really did the business was Lough Bresk, between Lisnarick and Irvinestown. It produced a number of respectable weights including a catch of 23.67 kilos for Gus Greaves, a former Classic champion with an address just up the road in Kesh, putting him in second place on the leader board going into yesterday's second match.

The catch of the day was landed by English angler Michael Wright from the shore in front of the Manor House Hotel and weighed in at 27.76 kilos to win him the top daily prize of £500.

The Broadmeadow at Enniskillen produced a bag of 22.4 kilos of fish for Paul Rafferty, from Radford, to earn him third place on the leader board while James Rush, from Belfast, was fourth with 21.19 kilos off Cornagrade shore.

The Classic is normally fished at 12 venues around Fermanagh but this year the organisers have increased that to 18 in a desperate attempt to find places where the competitors can catch fish. While the big prize money is very attractive, it is not everything. "They're anglers first and foremost so we have to give them a reasonable chance of catching a fish," explained Mr. McGovern. This is the 36th Classic and the ninth to be sponsored by Waterways Ireland. Yesterday's results were not available at time of going to press.

This article appeared in Impartial Reporter 12 May 11

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