"Don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" as the song says.
I used to generally only fish the odd qualifier as National Practice as they would always be the week before the National. Until the final year of the comp, only got close to qualifying once when I lost a double figure carp on the Bassi after a 20 minute run around on a 4 elastic, which would have got us to the final.
In 2002, usual pairs partner was unavailable so joined up with a teammate in the same position on the GUC at Northampton. We won the qualifier dropping only 6 points out of 300 with a collective 12 lb or so of gudgeon and scrap roach which was a display of pretty inappropriate skills for the Ebro...
Anyway, we managed 4th in the final in Spain. Its a good job Dave and I split the winnings 50/50 as if it had been performance related I'd have been lucky to get a tenner out of the £1500.First day saw me on the receiving end of the mother of all batterings off the next peg by Carpmagic- around 190lb to 70....and 6 points from 20, made worse when found that Dave had won his section.
Redeemed myself a bit on a very hard second day with 18 points and we sneaked in fourth.
Wish had fished it a lot more over the years now.Good though the AT pairs probably is, two days at Larford isn't the same as a week in Spain or Denmark....
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