Kennington Park Angling Club - Inter Committee match

This years Inter-Committee match took place as usual over two legs. The first leg was fished at Aveley fisheries in Upminster on Sunday 4th July where the team had a slow start to the day and found it difficult to score some much needed points. Club staleworts Trevor Lacey and Gary Norfolk managed to land a few early fish but local knowledge proved invaluable to the Aveley team who were finding and landing the fish at a far greater rate than KPAC. It was mid-way through the session and the "Winstons" took hold and began to claw back some positions on the leader board and towards the end both anglers netted over 15lb of fish each, earning Steve Winston a 2nd place and Dan Winston a creditable 3rd. Paul Eppelet managed to turn in a hard fought 6th with Ian Montague uncharacteristically staying out of the water and coming a very dry 7th! The whole day was a difficult contest with both sides finding it difficult to gain any sort of foothold and no-one landed the sort of net weight that was expected for a lake of this reputation. Credit to S. Hammond of Aveley who turned in an impressive 26lb on the day, earning his team a whopping 23 points. Overall, it wasn't the result we hoped for and everything was to play for on the return leg in two weeks time.
Result after 1st Leg - Aveley 153 points, KPAC 134 points.

Onto the 2nd leg which was contested on Sunday 18th July and took place on the Back lake of the KPAC waters.
The match wasn't off to a great start due to Aveley having two less anglers than necessary taking part. With KPAC having one more than Aveley, it was decided to award them a head start by way of offering them 15 points and with KPAC 19 points behind from the 1st leg, even before the whistle blew, we were 34 points behind with a lot to do. With the start of the match taking place at 8am sharp, everyone knew the task ahead and with a few early fish it was looking to be a good day for all. Aveley had some inside knowledge in Messr's Cope and Pryor, familiar faces to our waters but unfortunately, the pair of them only managed a 2lb 9oz between them and knowing this result things were looking up for KPAC. Dave Haydon landed a nice 3lb tench within half an hour of the start but failed to accomplish much more for the next 6 hours. Once again, Gary Norfolk came to the rescue with a great catch of F1 carp from peg 16, one of his favourites, being closely followed by another great performance from Steve Winston who had a hard fought catch totalling 8lb with 3 very nice bream helping him along the way. Monty bettered his 1st leg position and moved into 5th (and stayed dry) while Paul Eppelet again performed excellently, coming 6th once again. The latter hours of the match were somewhat quiet and a few of the team managed to land a few fish within 30 minutes of the final whistle at 2pm.
With the one arm bandit (Bernie) keeping everyone informed of the catch rate it was nip and tuck as to how well KPAC had performed, but was it enough? At the final weigh-in, Aveley scored 65 points and KPAC scored 92.

Overall, points from both legs are as follows:

Aveley      218 points
KPAC        226 points

KPAC once again retain the trophy for another year by amassing a huge margin of just 8 points overall and as always, the club very much looks forward to next year's competition in the hope of a repeat performance.