This year’s competition has seen a bit of a change-up with the scoring system. Adopting a points/cm style approach. This system rewards quantity with fish points and quality through extra score points and keeps the match competitive all along the beach regardless of whether you have the numbers of fish in front of you or if you have several decent fish and nothing much else.

Showing up at the venue yesterday morning, it wasn’t looking good, with huge piles of weed sitting just above the tide line and visible weed turning over along the waterline. Luckily, as the tide started to drop before the competition, a lot of the weed was deposited along the sand and after the 1st hour of fishing, most of the weed was left high and dry and the fishing wasn’t too uncomfortable.

Fishing got off to a slow start on the top pegs with very few flatfish about during the daylight, but the light was dropping fast, and the casts began going longer as anglers started hammering the whiting hoards when they got on the feed. Young club member Layton Finlay was steadily plucking out fish after fish, having seemingly found the sweet spot. This resulted in fish on almost every cast or every other cast, finishing up with 22ish and a hefty scorecard for a junior. Karl on the end peg was steadily lifting a few after finding them at distance and managing to find the dogfish for the big points in the new scoring system.

Reports along the beach were a little sketchy, as it’s hard to tell how anyone else is doing purely by fish numbers, which keeps things interesting. Just past the halfway point, Karl thought he was doing well with 9 fish, including a few of the high-scoring dogfish. Reports filtered through that Paul Beggs was on the fish and was currently sitting with 17 fish on the middle of the beach, with Sammy Stirling also hitting good numbers. Jonny Gilbert was in the thick of the fish on the middle pegs also and was matching the guys around him for fish count when he decided to gamble and start thumping it out for dogs; unfortunately, they just weren’t there around the middle pegs, and Jonny lost valuable time as the anglers around him kept plugging away at the whiting, with Dodgy also dropping a bass at his feet in the breaking waves.

Greame Ruddy, on the higher 1/3 of the beach, noticed a few others had found the odd dog here and there around him but decided to stay on the constant stream of smaller fish which were thick on the ground in front of him; in hindsight, this proved to have possibly cost him a better result than the 5th position in which he finished. Over 30 fish, but too many with minimal points to put a dent on the podium finish.

Final results were tallied up, and Paul Beggs took overall 1st place with an impressive card of 44 fish and taking the cash prize and the P&O crossing along with a cash prize.

• 1st Paul Beggs
• 2nd Jonah Jones
• 3rd Karl McCullough
• 4th Sammy Stirling
• 5th Greame Ruddy