Below: Steve starts the groundbaiting session on the first day's signal from peg C24. England's feeding strategy involved balling in 15 balls, made up of 2 bags of Terre de Riviere, 2kg of River and either 1kg of Carp or Gros Gardons. This was followed by 8 balls in the pole pot, split as follows: 4 sticky mag with stones and 4 with double leamed bloodworm.

Below: The main barrage finished, Steve now concentrates on not only on pin point accuracy with the pole cup but something else.......

Below: One of the main features of England's feeding strategy was how they fed with the cup. Unlike many around who emptied the pot just above the water, England's plan was to raise the pot quite high off the water and use the velocity gained to give the balls more momentum as they sank in the deep and fast flowing water. Another reason for dropping the top up balls from a height, was to further maintain noise to draw fish from the surrounding area once the initial bombardment had finished. This strategy will also be mentioned by William Raison when he gives the FIRST EVER Internet Video Interview, by an angler, to MA.com. This will be available on our sister site theanglingvideoacademy before the end of September.

Above & below: It doesn't take Stevie long, about 10-15 minutes, to latch into something....

Left: Safely in the net and now on his way, Steve unhooks a good River Vah roach of about 10ozs.

Below: Fish number two is on... and this time it's something a little bit bigger...

Above & below: Steve obviously takes his time to edge the fish closer to the waiting net and finally gets the net underneath it and adds a solid Vah bream, of about a kilo, to his solitary roach, now he's really up in the section. Both the roach and bream have been caught an a standard lollipop, but now a change will be made to a large 40gr Cralusso to see if a stationary bait will produce anything else...

Below: ...it's not too long before Steve gets the response he's looking for and he knows exactly what to do with this fish! Instinctively he knows it's a barbel and immediately raises the 13 metre pole straight up in the air and apply's as much pressure as possible... why? Because litering the bed of this river are thousands of very sharp mussel beds and barbel have their mouths slung underneath their snouts so if you don't get them off the bottom immediately they run along the mussel beds until they snap the line and then its goodbye mega points. Welshman Darren Frost knows all about them from his day two match!!!

Above left & right: Once off the bottom the barbel is a good as landed, this one of Steve's weighs about 700grs and guarantees his section win!

Steve had a couple more fish, yellow ruffe, which were about 2ozs each and brought his final weight to a section winning 1.870kg. He was now on his way to that most elusive of acheivements.