A report on the recent PredatorTour Pike event held on Lough Derg by Tomasz Kurman [mailto:[email protected]] who works as an angling guide for pike and trout on Lough Corrib.
Subject: tomi’s report Predator Tour
On the last week of September we had a pleasure to take part in the Predator Tour Ireland Competition.
This is a C&P&R (Catch, Photo, Release) competition so all fish after measuring and photographing were immediately released.Comp was held on Lough Derg in Killaloe, and organized by Herman Molenaar. It was new water for us so we fished the lake few times before competition to get to known the water a little bit 😉 We didn’t have much time but from July we were able to wet the lines in Lough Derg about 7 times. Not much, but after every “training session”. We knew a little more about this beautiful water.
During the competition we had to photograph our catch on measuring board provided by organizers. Boards were handed to each team in the morning and had to be returned to one of the crew boats before 5pm. It was total length competition but it was necessary to catch three species- 6 pikes, 3 perch and one trout. Sizes comes second after completing all three “species stages”. Perch were counted only after catching 6 pikes and trout only after 6 pikes and 3 perch.
We fished for 8 hours every day in “typical Irish” conditions with last day to be the wildest!
This competition was not only about to be the most effective in catching all three species- it involved a lot of tactical planning, risk/ possibilities
assessments and maths, as situation was changing every minute. Limited number of fish which were counted for final result forced all the teams to unstopped calculations during fishing.
After 3 days of competition we completed all three species but we didn’t know the final results until following night.
Finally on Thursday night it became clear that Corrib Predator Team – Tomi Kurman and Jack Gorny won the entire competition with almost 1.5 meter over second Team and leaving behind Teams from Netherlands, Ireland, Croatia, Poland, England, Belgium, and France.
Also we had biggest and second biggest pike of the competition (107.5cm and 107 cm) and second best perch at 38 cm!
Results:
1. Jacek Gorny, Tomasz Kurman (Poland) ………………..694 cm
2. Krzysztof Sibiga, Bartosz Schoen (Poland)…………….558 cm
3. Milan Marian, Anthony Thrill (Croatia)…………………..537 cm
We would like to thank everybody who helped us in preparation to the Competition:
Igor Klosowski, Michal Galda, Krzysztof Sibiga, Paul Bourke, Danny Tiernan and Grzegorz Zarebski who equipped us with great hand crafted trout lures.
Thanks Guys!!!
