World Carp Angling Championship Debacle - The Blame Game Begins

Following the disastrous performance of Korda Team England in the 2012 World Carp Angling Championships England management blame the bait...

As previously reported on FishingMagic the 14th World Carp Angling Championships were held at Lac Corbu in Romania and Korda Team England finished a very poor 18th out of the 20 competing teams, beating only Macedonia and Bosnia Herzegovina.

However, comments by the England team management after the event seem to suggest not having access to the ‘going’ bait was the primary reason behind the failure; this despite the fact that every team who had actually practised on the venue were aware of the situation and had chosen their bait accordingly.

Ian Huntington, Korda England Carp Team Manager said:

“Despite putting in a tremendous amount of work this year leading up to the event the outcome turned out to be never in any doubt from the host nation’s point of view. The key to the match and what we did not know was the carp had been fed with one single type of soluble bait, since they were stocked into Lac Corbu in May 2012. Consequently countries that had been and practised a number of times at the venue were aware of this and managed to get local bait to enable them to compete. The neighbouring Bulgarians commissioned their own bait based on what had been fed to the fish. Portugal and Serbia had contacts in Romania who provided bait. We only discovered after the match that the fish were fed daily throughout the summer by boat on the Romanian bait from fixed lines parallel with the bank.

It is obvious that any team fishing with the particular type of bait would do well and the rest would really struggle to get a bite. Within two hours of the match starting we were asking ourselves questions about the bait. We later found out from the South African team and the French team consultant Ronnie De Groot that they had also brought different English boilies from two other leading manufacturers, most of which stayed on the pallets and was not used at all in the case of South Africa. That’s 1.5 tonnes of boilies or £10,000 worth of bait wasted.”

Ian continued:

“Hard lessons have been learnt and it has been a very difficult experience to pick the team and ourselves up after this event. We are extremely disappointed that the water was fed with a single bait. While this is not strictly against the rules, and the Romanians freely admitted to doing it we feel that there is a moral issue here, and question whether this practice is in the spirit of fair play. I have already spoken to Dick Clegg about this and he is going to take the matter up with FIPSed at this year’s November meeting in Italy. While we appreciate the Lac Corbu is unique because its fish stock are brand new, thus making this selective feeding of the water more possible, other host nations might be tempted to follow suit in future, which could lead to a potential break up of the competition.

On behalf of the team I would like to thank the team sponsors Korda for all their help and fantastic support throughout the year.”

Dick Clegg OBE, International Events Manager for the Angling Trust stated:

“When Ian and Pete took over the roles of Manager and Coach of England’s Carp team I was convinced that I had appointed two people who were capable of winning gold. This result although extremely disappointing for all has not changed my mind. I have seen the professional way that they conducted all the pre match practises and organised the logistics of transporting both team and equipment to Romania and I know that we will soon be back on the podium. It is obvious from the information that I have received that questions need to be asked about certain aspects of the event. I am due to attend a FIPSed technical meeting in mid November and I will certainly require an explanation about a number of problems arising from this Championship.”