The 2024 Daiwa Irish Pairs match angling festival was held last week, with some great fish caught, and lots of memories made. The Daiwa Pairs is a sea angling festival held in Dingle every September, and is one of the largest sea angling festivals on the British and Irish calendar. Attracting many visitors from the UK and around Ireland, last week was the 41st running of the event. The festival is generously sponsored by Daiwa with additional support from Bassboots.
The festival consists of a number of pegged matches on venues around the peninsula, including Ventry, Cappa, Brandon and Inch. this year saw mostly settled weather, with venue changes not necessary and all matches went ahead as planned. Darren Smith reports:
Fantastic hot and settled weather for the first week on ‘Costa Del Dingle’ meant the specimen hunt and surf beaches were challenging this year but Ventry produced a record number of dogs (the venue having been left untouched for the week prior to the match) and the main event again went to the wire at on Day 3.
Specimen Fish
There were a good number of specimen fish caught during the week with a fantastic Sting Ray (81cms across the wings and estimated at around 70lb) caught by Tom Wells which earned him fish of the week. The mixed format of matches and specimen hunting gave opportunities for all until 4pm on Friday to get onto that very substantial prize table.
We remain committed to our ever-developing Fish Welfare policy and will be retaining our 2-hook-only rule for 2025 which takes a lot of bait pressure off the anglers, their pockets and protects resources.
This year, again we had over £9,000 of Daiwa tackle prizes to give to the various winners; as well as over £9,000 of cash and pool prizes; we also had on-board around £1,000 worth of Bass Boots prizes. A huge thank you to Daiwa Sports, who give us fantastic sponsorship and support; Bassboots, similarly, and SAMF who provide us insurance cover for the week’s festival.
A few thanks in addition to our main event sponsors:
Sarah, Nettie and the lovely and helpful staff at The Dingle Bay Hotel for once again providing us our match HQ.
Nick Haward for his great support in helping me in running the event in Dingle this year given my difficult personal circumstances and Nick, together with Mark Aldred for helping out with the 2024 Pairs draw. Thanks too to Dave Hutch and Amanda for transporting over the tackle prizes and again it was great to have Dalrymple’s back on peg and card collection duty.
Also and most importantly though, a massive, massive thanks to the all-important Match Committee of Jim and Ian who do give up a lot of their week to vet the week’s venues and help make those all-important venue choices (over a Guinness or two!) and to ensure the beaches are pegged and that the results are sorted and posted. It was a first-class performance from a first-class team – thanks lads (my best buddies!) for another blinding effort.
A special well done Dave Falk and Brett Cotter for winning and retaining the 2024 Daiwa Irish Pairs 
(the first pair to do so).
(the first pair to do so).
