I'd be very interested to hear people's opinions on this as well, having just about recovered from organising the Whitley open at the weekend:hallucine:. I tend to agree that the boundaries are getting a bit big - we're considering making the northern boundary perhaps Craster Harbour for next year, but there are so many things to consider. This year the tide wasn't particularly good, so many of the local marks wouldn't have uncovered properly, giving limited time to fish. By including some of the up-the-coast marks, at least you get the chance to fish the whole comp without having to move to far should you wish. Mind you, even finding a date for next year's comp isn't proving easy as once the clocks go back, the earliest low water on a weekend is around 9am and all the better tides fall midweek - and it'll get increasingly worse over the next few years.
Until two years ago we included the Tyne, up to the Ice house & the biggest gripe we used to hear was "you shouldn't have the river in, it puts so many off fishing..." etc. etc. and we had many people saying taking it out was the best thing we'd done. Then of course, we had those who liked to fish the river saying "why's the river not in any more..."
I remember fishing the Whitley Festival back in '79 when I was 15, when we had 400 out on the saturday & 680 on the sunday, all fishing between Tynemouth & Blyth piers. Every rock edge would be littered with anglers and some good catches would be had - there would probably have been 30-40 juniors and enough ladies to have their own trophy. These days though, I don't think we'll ever see numbers like that for a local open again, and it's all to easy to become one of those "Remember When's", sitting around lamenting the state of today's catches and events. It's certainly sad to see the lack of juniors at today's events.
Prizes? Personally, I'd be happy with the trophy & title of winner of any major open, and a couple of hundred quid would be a welcome bonus. There is the argument that huge prize money attracts the cheats - particularly a problem with the open-roving type event, although not such a problem in a pegged / cmr type match (although remember the fuss with last year's Penn League winner - they're not totally immune). Lots of people I know just consider the opens irrelevant these days and choose not to fish any of them.
Quite a lot of the hard-core club anglers I know will regularly get together and fish cash matches, the tenner-a-head type thing, with a simple percentage payout for 1st, 2nd & 3rd & usually something for the heaviest fish - so for these lads it's pretty much all or nothing as there are no supporting prizes, so I think the kudos/bragging rights and maybe a few quid are the attraction here. I always felt that the opens however should be more about rewarding more people for their effort - I'm not saying that a just-size whiting should be automatically rewarded with a new rod, but those more occasional anglers who've had to make do with a couple of bags of rag worm and are skilful/lucky enough to bag a few fish should get something.
Too many opens? Again, when I was younger, there were a few big opens that everyone looked forward to fishing - The Tynemouth, Whitley & Shiremoor in particular and the Whitley "Tetley All Nighter", fished over high down to low and up a bit from something like 10pm to 7am. That became the Evening Open, fished over 4 hours - more like an extended club comp. This year and last there have been two evening opens, and next year it looks like there'll be three, as well as the sunday opens. I'm beginning to think that there are just getting to be too many opens competing for fewer people who care...
What we've been trying to do is listen to the majority & keep as many people happy as possible, but as Micky has pointed out you simply can't please everybody. I'd say that most clubs do their best (and it nearly always falls to just one or two people within the club to do everything) and I'll be the first to admit we're not perfect, but we're trying!
Gary
