Airflo Open Championship 2023 Rutland Water

It was with great excitement that The Welsh Hawks set off for the grand final of the Airflo Open championship at RUTLAND water. Now this event holds a certain amount of magic with plenty of history! It first began way back in the mid-80s, back then it was sponsored by Benson and Hedges but obviously with the ban on advertising quite a few other sponsors have come and gone over the years. It’s now been taken on by Airflo who not only sponsor the event but run it as well. Diligent work with no shortage of planning makes it one of the best run events in the country, and we must thank both Airflo and Gareth Jones and Kieron Jenkins for all their hard work.

The Hawks had been building up to the event over the weeks before with a few of the team going down for the odd weekend on Rutland. The feeling was it was going to be difficult with the lake having not been stocked between June and September and nearly 1000 Cormorants with flocks of 500 it was always going to be hard going! Couple this with a very warm week in the middle of September we were not overly confident of the best fishing.

Practice certainly proved this was the case with the team split across the arms and basin of Rutland’s 3500 acres, it was evident that there were very few areas that held quantities of fish. A stocking of some 600 fish went into Whitwell bay on the Monday a week before the comp so obviously the mouth of this bay was one such area that we knew to target, the others we identified were Normanton shore between the lodge and blues pipes, also a smaller area around Berrybutts and the last being the very top of the north arm around Tim Appleton’s where there were some decent sized fish to be caught if conditions allowed. In practice we’d caught reasonably well here using shrimp patterns but if conditions weren’t right, it was very difficult to get takes. One thing that connected all our areas was that was the fish were close to or inside the long kelp type weed that had sprung up in around 15ft of water.

So, match day one loomed and our plan was to split our boats across the Normanton shore, the mouth of Whitwell and the top of the north arm. The weather forecast was 15-20mph westerly winds so this would effectively rule out most methods except pulling with the majority of the 63 boats doing just that.

The rough conditions made it a gruelling day with Gaz returning from the north arm with 6 good fish including a 5lb 9oz rainbow. Anthony did exceptionally well to grind 6 fish from the slightly sheltered sailing club frontage and myself I was fortunate to get 8 fish from the very choppy waters where the wind from both arms met around blue pipes. The rest of the team of Wayne Gus and Christian chipped in with 3 each.

Results after day 1 saw us sitting in second place, some 7 fish behind Team Fulling Mill Tequila who had sent the entire team to sit on the buoy line at Whitwell.

Day 2;

A very windy day was forecast with a slight change of wind direction compared to day 1.
So, our plan was much the same apart from Gaz being drawn on the front of the boat with Matt Griffiths from Fulling Mill Tequila, this would be an interesting day with 2 different trains of thoughts of what to do. Would the stock fish on the buoy line hold out for 2 days?
We gambled that it wouldn’t be the case and sent our boats to Normanton and Berrybutts with Gaz being taken to Whitwell by Matt.
Tactics were similar to day 1 but unfortunately as is often the case, boat pressure put pay to the Normanton shore with the wind channelling the boats along the shore added even more pressure. Gaz managed to move Matt away from Whitwell for a couple of hours, long enough to grab a decent bag of 5 fish from the north arm, Wayne took 3 good fish from Berrybutts tight in on the weed using shrimp patterns, with the other 4 of us only chipping in another 6 fish between us which saw us drop from 2nd to 3rd overall.

Rod average of 2.5 and 2.05 tells the story on how hard the fishing was particularly when you consider the class of anglers fishing to comp. But despite the very difficult fishing and harsh conditions we would not miss this competition!
Once again huge congratulations to Team Fullingmill Tequila for the win executing a team plan to the letter.

Until next time!!

Top flies for the week were Gazza’s Orange Stabilized Daddy, Sunburst Tail Candy Booby, Russell’s Green Head Corm, The Red Head JC Corm and the Shrimps (Coming soon)