A Big Win on the AIR Z by Tom Scholey

Tom Scholey has won the Garbolino Spring Festival at Lindholme Lakes with a perfect four point score. The popular event was contested by 66 rods, and saw weights up to 300lb recorded over the course of the five day contest.

Tom explained : “Having recently relocated back to my birth-town of Sheffield, I was keen to get back on the local commercial circuit, and Lindholme is somewhere with a pedigree of running great match fishing events. I fished a couple of practice matches on the weekends leading up to the festival and was so glad that I did, as I don’t think I could have got the tactics any more wrong! So important lessons were learnt, most notably the importance of fishing hard pellets on the bottom, even despite the balmy hot conditions.

The festival also proved the first proper workout for my new Daiwa Air Z pole. A lot of the fishing was at 14.5m and 16m through the course of the week, and I can’t emphasise enough how impressed I am, not just with the obvious stiffness and rigidity, but also with the strength of the pole. I had to wrestle carp away from a snaggy island on one of the days, and pole stood up to everything I threw at it.”

My festival went really nicely, and I caught between 105lb and 157lb every day, racking up a perfect five section wins. On the pegs that I drew, the pole was the dominant methods and the hard pellet tactic that I had sussed out in practice worked on three of the five days, with casters shallow accounting for my weights on the other two days. All in all, an amazing week and I can’t wait to fish my next event at Lindholme Lakes!