Match report provided courtesy of James Bryan.

Well it's here, the last match of the year for many of us! It just happened to be the first proper frost of the year too.
After defrosting the cars and setting off, we arrived at 7:45am to a Wintery looking Meadow View with the temperature reading -4°C as we pulled into the car park. Everyone knew it was going to be a hard days fishing, but not as hard as it turned out to be...
Mark 'Butch' Whiteside arrived, took one look at the pool from the warmth of his car, went home and reappeared several hours later for the carvery. Members hurled some friendly abuse as you would expect!
With the Club Secretary absent today, the job of pools collector was volunteered by John Bryan with Frank doing his usual match money.
When we had an idea of how many were due to be fishing, Match Referee (for the day) James Bryan and Pegging Assistant Neil Prichard set about working out a pegging order that would give everyone a bit of space. Peg two miss one was the option that was chosen.
Walking round the pool you could see a thin layer of ice had formed, to the surprise of many, considering it was only one nights worth of cold weather. With one side of the pool having slightly more ice than the other.
The match today was going to be split up into two halves, the reason being as we all know, the fishing at the top end of Lark Pool on Meadow View tends to be not as good as the bottom end nearest the car park. Even more so in Winter!
So it would be the pegs at the bottom end fishing against each other and the top end fishing against each other. The pools winning payout today was for first and second in each half of the pool.
There were 24 fishing today which is a really good turnout to a Winter match and also considering the conditions. The draw got under way and all in was set for 10:00am.
Arriving to the pegs most people set about the usual landing net ice breaking method, with others using their poles to gently crack the ice to form a channel to fish in. It took a good 30 minutes for most people to break a decent path in the ice to be able to plumb the depth for the rig.
As the all in sounded at 10:00am everyone went out with their poles/rods and waited for what we hoped would be a nice Meadow View lump! I think it was about an hour that had passed before anyone had a fish and even then it was only a couple of roach. The hours went by and a couple had caught at least one carp with most people still blanking.
Just after the all-in Santa arrived in the form of Neil Davies, who wasn't fishing the match but came to hand out chocolates to the masses, much appreciated by all.
In the last hour or two, the ice had begun to thaw and the bites seemed to dry up for many. Everyone was praying for that last minute bite to come... 3:00pm struck and the all out was sounded, followed by a big cheer from around the pool!
As everyone began to pack up, it was clear that a lot had blanked with the ones that had caught still only having one fish or so.
We made our way around the pool to get the weigh in done, with me (James) being the scalesman for today. Not a lot came out with only a few here and there being caught. There was a smile on one mans face though, Jonny Green. He'd landed a 14lb 14oz Mirror Carp to kick off the biggest fish of the year so far and the match win on one half of the pool with Mark Davies taking the win on the second half of the pool.
Golden Peg today was Jim Bates and was cursed with several others today with a 'DNW'.

That's about it for 2014, our next league is Spring which kicks off on 11th April 2015 at Border Fishery, all that's left to say is have a great Christmas and New Year, best wishes to you all, stay safe and we will see you in 2015.

See you all soon.


Tightlines