Intro

Welcome to the summer Newsletter 2006 to both our new and regular members. I will try and keep this as short as possible while covering what we have achieved this term and our aspirations so to speak for the run up to Christmas.

Web Site

This term the biggest achievement so far has to be the web site. This has given us a greater means of passing information around to our members not to mention the cost saving of all those stamps. Each command has their own pages available to them and it is great to see all those competitions and matches going on within each area. This site will remain an open site with all reports and information available for all who wish to have access. If you wish to have any information displayed, please pass this to your command rep who will then forward it to Lin. All rnrmaa info and pics will go through me.

Recruitment

Recruitment is still (and will always be) an ongoing issue. Each command must be more proactive in their recruiting campaign of serving members, there are still a lot of guys out there who would like to get into the sea angling scene but are unsure of who to contact. I am in the process of having a poster designed (with the help of my ships phot), I will have this published and sent to all club swingers and command reps before the term ends. The Fleet Air Arm has now come into play with Ian Gibbs as the command rep. Al Newman is the lead at Heron and have 25 or so members. Most of these are shore anglers and we should see a few of those at Arpoath this year, alongside the new guys from 45 Cdo.

Competitions

I will not run through an event by event of the matches so far as these are displayed on the web, I will give a quick appraisal of the ones this term.

The main one of these has to be the RNRMAA members that have been selected to represent England. Cliff Newbold was selected to represent England at the home boat championships in Ireland. Cliff fished extremely well and not only had good placing on his boat days, but also helped England win the Gold medal. Well done cliff, Norman will be proud of you.

Steve Clements (now retired and life member), has been selected to represent the England world team in Portugal. Good luck Steve and hopefully someone might give those Italians a run for their money. (Italy is current world champions in sea angling as well as footy).

The RNRMAA boats championships were held at Plymouth in may this year in preparation for the Inter services boat match which followed. I had expected a lot more to turn out than the two boat loads which did. This was fished on the Eddystone reef in moderate weather and some nice fish were caught and we had a cracking day out.

The Inter services boat match was also held in Plymouth following the RNRMAA boat championships. Normally in Plymouth we are able to field our strongest team and have won this match on both previous occasions it was held here. Not this time though, unable to get most of our strong anglers off left us with four anglers who have just started boat fishing. We had by far the novice team we have had out for some time; both other services fielded very strong teams indeed. THE Army won this match quite convincingly and the RAF finished close on their heels. Not to be down heartened by this, the rotation of anglers through all services means that the trophy passes through hands quickly as each service tries to rebuild their squad each year. Our turn will come round again soon enough.

The next match was the five service challenge to be held in Portsmouth in July. I organised this as I thought that it was a normal match on the calendar. It was supposed to have been between the normal three services plus the police and Fire services. To cut away all the grey stuff the army disagreed and pulled out, to be replaced with a team from boat fishing monthly magazine. Cliff Newbold eventually won the individual prize but the Police won the day as team winners, each winning a quality telescopic Gravell rod. Well done to Cliff and the coppers.

Matches for the rest of this year will be the combined services boat team against the Police at Weymouth in October. The team will consist of six from us and five from both RAF and Army. Accommodation for the RNRM and RAF will be at the Sailors return.

November will be the Inter services shore match at Arpoath staying at RM Condor, each service fielding a 15 man squad.

For the International matches, we will be putting two teams of four into the YYS and another team into the Weymouth species hunt.

If you are interested in competing in any of these matches please contact me soonest. I will send the usual signal to all units.

Yours in Sport

Tom Worthy