River Parrett – J. Irish Trophy – 10th August 2025

For round four of the Memorial Shield, we were back at Parrett Works and after drawing a bunghole end peg in the last match another good one was required today. Once we’d had breakfast and paid pools etc, it was time for the ‘Bucket of Doom’, I grabbed a milk bottle top and when I summoned the courage to look, I was delighted to see the number 28 written on it, one of best pegs in the bottom field (along with 29).

It looked lovely and a couple of small fish topped as I was setting up but I thought it might be hard going with a scorching hot day forecast. On the whistle I started across inching a little light rig through and just feeding a few casters and some hemp via the catty. I caught a minnow to avoid the blank, double red maggot resulted in two gudgeon, a tiny roach and then decent one. After an hour I had two net roach, a small one plus ten gobies and was getting a few indications.

Going into the second sixty minutes I added another decent roach and a nice dace on double caster but bites were beginning to dwindle. Tom R below me on 29 walked up and said he’d lost a chub while Alex above was only getting minnows (and a trout). Trying further across I had a couple more gudgeon and bumped what felt like a better fish, a quality roach on double maggot and then another on caster kept my catch rate ticking over.

With an hour and a quarter to go, I couldn’t get a bite so I fed chopped worm and caster for eels down the middle and went straight over it with worm on the hook. I gave it 25 minutes but only had one little knock so back across for two gobies and a small dace but it was a real struggle now. The final quarter of an hour was spent unsuccessfully trying to catch an eel. I finished up with 32 fish (roach, dace and gudgeon) plus a few minnows.

Tom had the scales so I went down to weigh him in first, he had 1lb 2oz, my fish went 2lb 15oz, Alex weighed 14oz, Nigel on 26 had 15oz which included two eels, Parker ‘The Pole’ weighed 11oz (mainly small fish), Derek G had 1lb 3oz and the last angler in our section was Dave Hilton who had worked hard catching loads of minnows and some small fish for 1lb 5oz.

I had some nice roach and dace plus gudgeon and minnows for 2lb 15oz

Nigel had 15oz on peg 26

Derek weighed 1lb 3oz which included a nice dace and loads of minnows

Dave H had loads of minnows and gudgeon for 1lb 5oz and second in the section

Back at the cars and the other section had fished better, Norts had a lovely net of quality roach to 12oz on peg 18 to win the match with 7lb 11oz, Nick P was second with 3lb 6oz of chublets from peg 5, Dave P weighed 2lb 6oz on 16 and Fieldy on 9 had 1lb 8oz.

Section A
1 – Chris Norton (Stoke) – 7lb 11oz
2 – Nick Payne (Ilminster) – 3lb 6oz
3 – Dave Pope (Stoke) – 2lb 6oz
4 – Graham Field (Taunton) – 1lb 8oz

Section B
1 – Jamie Rich (Bait-Tech/Colmic) – 2lb 15oz
2 – Dave Hilton (Stoke) – 1lb 5oz
3 – Derek Goad (Stoke) – 1lb 3oz
4 – Tom Rattenbury (Stoke) – 1lb 2oz

I picked up £35 for the section win and another 10 points edges me into the lead for the Memorial Shield but it’s extremely tight with just four points between the top five,

Jamie Rich – 36 pts (7)
Dave Pope – 35 pts (7)
Dave Hilton – 34 pts (8)
Derek Goad – 32 pts (6)
Chris Norton – 32 pts (5)
Mike Goad – 30 pts (3)

your best five results from six matches count towards the trophy (dropper in brackets).

At breakfast, Norts donated £5, the Grand Wiz added £2 and Nick P gave me another £2 as the Nugget-O-Meter climbed to £510.

There’s still a great offer running if you fancy treating yourself to some new fishing gear, use the exclusive discount code AgainstMenandFish10 to get 10% off when you shop online at Somerset Angling

Also I still have copies of my book available from eBay here or Amazon here