ENGLAND GO CLOSE AT WORLD CARP CHAMPS

The Angling Trust Cirus Carp Team England Men’s squad were certainly put through the wringer in their quest to win gold in the World Carp Angling Championships, enduring searing heat and a biblical storm on Croatia’s Lakes Lapovac and Sandor.

After 72 hours of fishing, the team finished in seventh place on 16 points, a vast improvement on 2023’s result and only four points away from getting into the podium, host nation Croatia winning with 11 points, Moldova taking second on 11 with an inferior total weight and Belgium ending up in third place on 13 points.

Top performers for England was the duo of Mark Bartlett and Kev Hewitt on B section peg 19 with three penalty points for seventh overall. Wayne Mansford and Karl Palmer on A section peg 1 ended in 26th on 9 points and Karl Pitcher and Jamie Viney on peg 26 of C section, who was subbed for Jermaine Hull on the final day scoring 17 points for 51st overall.

The lads had been as high as fifth overall going into the closing stages, but a combination of lost carp and fish being landed by other nations to take points off them saw the side ultimately end up a couple of carp away from a medal.

There was also a storm to contend with on the Friday night, which wrecked bivvies and soaked kit for many nations, a combination of torrential rain, 60mph winds and hailstones the size of a pound coin making survival, never mind catching fish, the main priority!

“It’s not the result we wanted, especially after having been within touching distance of the podium at one stage,” said England Manager Neil Rivers. “We suffered in C section, which had a lot of snags. Karl Pitcher and Jamie Viney must have hooked a dozen fish in the final day but only landed three and looking at the final scores, just two or three of those lost fish landed would have given us the extra few points to get us a medal. It was the same for a lot of teams though, and I can’t fault the anglers as they’re experienced and know the score. It’s more down to luck than anything else if a snagged fish comes out or not.”

After a slow start, England began to creep up the leaderboard, going from 19th to fifth with the all-important final day to come. According to Neil that is when carp matches are almost always won and lost as the pegs have been built up slowly and the fish are more confident in feeding.

“That’s the 24 hours when someone needs to be watching the rods all of the time. The anglers take it in turns to grab a few hours’ sleep at a time overnight, but after that storm, I think everyone was shattered as nobody slept!” he explained. “We’d got lots of good information from a local angler, which was bang on and it was all looking good. Going into the last day, confidence was sky high, and we were saying ‘we can do this’, but it didn’t quite go our way in the end.”

There was also a decision to get right with the fishing, namely trying to catch both the big carp in the two lakes but also the many hundreds of grass carp in residence. Both fish needed different bait and feeds.

“We’d been told that the grassies loved nuts, whereas boilies were better for the carp, so we hedged our bets a bit and fed a mix of local boilies, tiger nuts and maize to appeal to both fish and it was bang on,” Neil continued. “On the hook, anything from single or double tiger nuts to a yellow local boilie caught. You had to be ready to make a change though and react to what was feeding at that point.”