Two-times winner of the prestigeous £25k Parkdean Masters Harry Billing shares his thoughts on his recent success at White Acres All-Winners festival: -
"I have just fished the Whiteacres All Winners Week Festival down in Cornwall, a festival I have qualified for many times but never won yet. To qualify you have to win your big section outright on the Wednesday of any of the festivals, which is not that easy to do these days! here is how my three days went......
DAY 1 JENNYS PEG 16
I really fancied this peg as its very consistent and won loads of matches including the Parkdean Masters big money final a few times. I started on the method towards the post which always holds some fish especially early in the match. I had a good run of small F1s before catching a few on worms long on the pole on the bottom; then I went down the edge on caster, trying to catch everything that swims. By swopping and changing I managed to keep putting fish in the net for 42lb and a welcome section win. I would need to keep drawing well as the standard of angler as always is very high and seems to get better every year
DAY 2 POLLAYWYN PEG 32
This lake is fishing very hard at the moment as the skimmers have stopped feeding. This was the third week running of big matches on the lake and silvers can be very important here. They have taken a battering and been fed a lot of feed so it was always going to be tough. When the silvers arent hungry the carp also have too much choice as to whether they want to eat or not. I caught mainly roach and perch down the edge on casters by being very sensible with feed, and a few carp long on meat. I ended up weighing 45lb but got beat by Jamie Wilde on peg 13. Jamie caught some big carp down the edge to just push me into second and was now lying second overall and needed a good result to win come the final day.
DAY 3 TWIN OAKS PEG 35
I had a great match off this nice peg. It was one of those days where everything went according to plan. I had a nice steady run of fish on the method for 3 hours with micros round the feeder and pellet on the hook, then caught some big F1s down the edge on worm and caster fishing light for 'everything that swims' for 97lb and a section win.
I was delighted to find I had won the festival for the first time aer many years of trying! I just managed to win on weight after tying on points with Ian Ford. It is always a fine line between success and failure at these big events as the standard of angler is so high, one small wrong judgement, one lost fish or one bad decision and others will exploit that and push past you!
The final results were as follows:-
1st Harry Billing 23 Points Weight advantage
2nd Ian Ford 23 Points
3rd Chris Hancock 21 Points
