Mallory Park Fisheries - Snide Rumours & Dirty Lies

September 25th was the date for the £1000 summer Grand Final. 57 hopeful finalists met in the trackside cafe where a superb breakfast was laid on for all the entrants . This pleased ACE Downs as all those people eating meant that he could scoff his first plateful and then re-join the queue for a second without being noticed!

The draw commenced and it soon became clear that this match was no different to any other. The usual end peg specialists were pulling out their normal pegs, with even last year’s winner Dave Hunter managing to bag one - he was seen driving out of the track complex with his tyres on fire. We arrived at the Glebe to be met with conditions that didn’t suit, next to no wind and bright sunshine, beautiful for this time of year but not what we were looking for.

Part of Chris Needham's winning catch

The match commenced and it soon became apparent that the fish were in an unforthcoming mood and proving to be difficult to tempt. As the match came to a close it was clear that massive weights weren’t going to be needed. The phone lines were red hot all over the complex and it looked like there were only a few anglers in the reckoning. There had been a close battle on lakes 4 & 5 between Rob Bowser and Chris Needham - Rob admitting to 20 fish on lake 4 peg 68 and Chris on 24 from peg 79 lake 5. With the size of fish in these lakes no one could predict who would come out on top. As the weigh-in started on all the lakes it looked clear that the winner was likely to be one of these two. Rob's haul weighed in at 131.4.0 but Chris Needham's 24 fish weighed 155.14.0 and this was enough to scoop the £1000 top prize. Chris caught most of his fish on the feeder and caught late on the 5m corn line.

Apparently his local Chinese takeaway had to hire extra staff to prepare his meal that evening!

Other section winners were:

Pool 1
Section 1 Stu Wilies 89-1-0 peg 4
Section 2 Jim Chessman 117-4-0 peg 18
Section 3 Rob Winter 125-12-0 peg 29

Pool 4 Rob Bowser 131-4-0 peg 68
Pool 5 Mick Wilkinson 97-0-0 peg 82
Pool 6 Brian Envis 71-12-0 peg 86 (little girl's peg)
Pool 7 Gordon Priddy 73-8-0 peg 107

As you can see lakes 6 & 7 were sewn up by Mallory's two oldest members. Between them they have far more years than the first number on Chris Needham’s winning weight but it just goes to show how dangerous they are.

Finally the committee would like to apologise for not making it clear that this event was the £1000 Summer Grand Final, apparently one member who shall remain nameless was a little confused as to the occasion and thought that this was a work party gathering and proceeded to re-slab his peg. Only when other members pointed out that it was indeed a match did he start fishing!

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