MAKE IT A DOUBLE!
MAP’s Michael Buchwalder completed Match Fishing’s holy grail in the 2024 World Feeder Championships with Team Ireland claiming team and individual GOLD! Here’s how the event unfolded…
Representing your country in a World Championship has to be one of the biggest ambitions for many anglers as they set off on their match fishing journey. For newly crowned World Feeder Champion, Michael Buchwalder, that was no different!
MAP’s Michael Buchwalder completed Match Fishing’s holy grail in the 2024 World Feeder Championships with Team Ireland claiming team and individual GOLD! Here’s how the event unfolded…
Representing your country in a World Championship has to be one of the biggest ambitions for many anglers as they set off on their match fishing journey. For newly crowned World Feeder Champion, Michael Buchwalder, that was no different!
Watching anglers such as Bob Nudd claiming gold after gold it gave a young Michael something to aim for, so when the opportunity to fish for Ireland in the World Feeder Championship came up a few years back, it started a journey that has led to the greatest achievement in his career to date.
With a Team Bronze and an Individual Silver already to his name, it is fair to say that Michael’s foray into the international feeder scene has been one of the real success stories of recent times.
Even with those successes behind him and the team they couldn’t have ever imagined what was in store for him and the Irish team on the Guadiana River in Merida, Spain!
We caught up with Michael to get the full story and to get him to explain the full 2024 World Feeder Championship from start to finish…
The Venue
This year’s World Feeder Champs saw the team heading out to the Guadiana River which is in the south of Spain and is nothing like a river as we know it here in the UK!
This river is around 300-400 metres wide and is more like a reservoir with no real flow to speak of. The only flow you have is wind directional flow but there is little to no flow like we find on rivers back home so that was immediately different.
The river where the match would be taking place was in a town called Merida, and we made the decision as a team to drive to the venue this year. As the Irish team is all self-funded, we have to budget the full trip and this includes how we get to and from the venue, so it was over to France on the channel tunnel, driving the whole length of France with a stopover in Bordeaux for the night.
Next morning it was straight into the van to head south into Spain and get to the venue, the first look at the river was impressive, a huge expanse of water, very open and not dissimilar to what you’d be used to seeing on Lough Erne in Ireland.
Fishing wise the venue wasn’t something we’d be used to either and the dominant species were carassio, some wild carp and catfish. The European teams are more than used to fishing venues with these species but that’s all part of the learning curve and the challenge when fishing World Championships.
Team Ireland
This year’s team travelling to Spain was made up of myself, team manager Brenton Sweeney who has been involved with Ireland’s international feeder scene for 12 years now after a year off last year where I stepped in to manage the squad, so it was great to have him back and his enthusiasm for the team is second to none and I’d go as far to say that he has revolutionised feeder fishing in Ireland.
When you consider that the Irish feeder team now holds; World Championship Gold, Individual World Champion, Bronze in the World Club Champs, Gold in the World Club Champs… that’s four major feeder titles held by the country in a calendar year, which is unbelievable for a self-funded team and testament to Brenton’s dedication and exceptional management.
The rest of the team is surprisingly young, I’m the ‘old boy’ at 44! We’ve got 19-year-old Charlie Richards who has already been an individual World Youth U20’s Champion, an unbelievable talent who isn’t fazed by anything and fishing is his life, with two gold medals already to his name, the sky is the limit!
Then we’ve got James O’Doherty who is only 26, but has been fishing internationally since the age of 15, he’s won everything there is to win in Ireland and has lots of respect on the continent.
Rory Dunne was with us for his first World Championship, who was our top weight in practise 4 days out of five, I really believe that if we’d have had him in previous years, he could have made all the difference for us.
Johnny Mckinley who won a Gold with the Lurgan team on Lough Muckno last year, another angler who is accustomed to winning big events.
So, you can begin to see that although people might think the Irish team are out for a bit of fun and a few beers, we’re actually very serious, competitive with a team average age of early thirties! We’re set up for the next ten years, at least, and I truly believe that we’ll be rising up the ranks quickly in the coming years.
We had some amazing back room help too which played a huge part in our success from James Place, Dara Finnegan, Nick Richards and Nigel Houldsworth.
These guys play a huge part in running the bank, sorting bait and ensuring the whole event runs smoothly so we can get on with the fishing, without them, doing well would be nearly impossible, so they’re an important part of our team and the end result.
Practise Week
Practise is probably the most important part of any world championship and this time it was no different.
With us only taking five anglers to this world championship, we could work as a team without that competition for places which means some information may be held back, as the main aim for any angler is to be fishing on the first day.
By taking just five plus manager, Brenton, as our sixth man just in case anything went wrong, we could work together to get things sorted.
We didn’t get it right at first, with lots of fish present we found ourselves fishing far too positively and feeding too much bait. Slow starts for us stood out against teams like Czech Republic, Hungary and England who were catching well from the off.
But our last two hours of practise was prolific so we’d certainly been getting that first part wrong.
After a couple of days, Nick Richards and James came along and suggested that we were being far too positive early in the day, so a few changes were made for the following day.
Doing away with the bait up feeders and feeding and fishing with five-hole cages instead completely changed our results, with 20 fish in the first two hours for several of us where we’d not been catching 20 between us previously!
We knew we could catch late by really upping the bait when the better fish fed, but now we’d sorted that early part of the match we’d got a solid plan which gave us confidence.
Something that was lurking around the event was a norovirus outbreak at the hotel that the teams were staying at.
We’d felt that we’d been lucky to avoid it in the week with lots of teams suffering casualties, but on the last day I’d come down with it and James O’Doherty too, but battle on we did, and it was onto Day 1!
Day 1
On the first day I was heading to C section Peg 3 which wasn’t one we’d practised due to a mistake with the boxes, but I was straight onto the peg looking for the three-count which seemed to be the perfect depth for catching better quality fish. This was at 24 metres, a perfect range for what we’d been fishing in practice.
Tackle wise 11ft rods were best because of the rocky margins, early in the match I fished an 11ft MAP Parabolix Pro Ultralight Feeder to ensure everything went in the net and later when it was time to bag up, an 11ft MAP Parabolix Ultra II Feeder provided the extra power to get the fish in quicker.
Set up wise, a running feeder rig on 8lb Optimum main line to an 0.21 Optimum Power hook length and a size 10 hook was perfect – these fish certainly weren’t line or hook shy!
Up to my right I had world number 1 Felix Scheuermann fishing for Germany and Steve Ringer on the start of a point so I felt they’d either cancel each other out or totally dominate the section.
With the bait prepared it was time to kick things off– a groundbait mix of Sensas Gialla, Fine Carp and Black Tracix was by far the best in practise but the key bait for later in the match when the fishing really kicked off was five tins of liquidised corn!
To kick things off, I baited up with the five hole feeder casting it in ten times with next to nothing included with the groundbait, a few dead maggots and a tiny amount of chopped worm with all my eggs in one basket at 24m.
When the match began, I missed the first couple of bites on double bloodworm and a single maggot but I soon started to put a few in the net ending the first hour with 11 fish made up of mainly carassio and at that point I was doing well in the section.
Fishing remained steady for the first two hours, but at the two and a half hour point it was time to go positive and put on a big cage feeder packing it with the liquidised corn with double red worm hook baits, and it was pretty much instant with big carassio and a few carp dragging the tip round while tightening up solidly for an hour!
Things did go a little steadier in the fourth hour so I swapped back to a smaller feeder, and caught a few more before going positive again in the last hour to catch another 18-quality fish, a great way to wrap up the first day.
At the scaled I weighed 32 kilos, with Felix winning the section with 39 kilos and Steve beat me by just two kilos, and I can’t help but feel I could have beaten him had I not have gone positive so soon, maybe half an hour later and I would have timed it that little bit better to get another point, but third it was and a brilliant start.
Team wise, we’d had a great day, with my third, Charlie Richards came 5th, Rory Dunne 2nd with an outstanding performance, James O’Doherty who was really suffering with the virus somehow managed a fourth and finally Johnny McKinley who was on a real snag pit came 16th.
We’d accumulated 30 points and were sitting in silver medal position going into day two, but it was only half time…
Day 2
I’d had a dream the night before that I’d drawn D21, so when I was sat on the toilet for the 10,000th time in the last few days and a message came through from Brenton that I’d drawn it, I nearly fell off!
This was an amazing peg, and I felt so confident going into the match with the plan we had that I was expecting to have a great match.
It was pretty much a repeat of day one – find the right depth, again at around 24 metres start off really negative and catch what you can for two and a half hours and then really step it up for a big finish. I was in good company in this section, with Lee Kerry a few pegs down among others who are just so hard to beat, so it was going to be a great battle on the final day.
I had a great start to the match catching plenty of carassio by fishing negatively, maggots or worm hook baits being the best as they had been all week, and then half way through it was time to go for it with the big cage feeder to target those bigger fish and put a weight together.
The fishing was amazing, especially for a world championship venue with bites coming as soon as the feeder hit the bottom in most cases – big carassio mainly with some turbo charged carp thrown in too.
I ended the match with an excellent 45 kilos to win my section, but it was close with me and Lee Kerry, who had 40 kilo and we’d had pretty much the same fish count so it just goes to show that our tactics for catching a slightly better stamp were perfect on this occasion.
Double Gold!
With my section win in the bag, it was now time to start putting our results together and hope we’d have enough to secure a medal. While trying to get more information on results Lee Kerry came down and said to me “Bud I think you’ve done it, we think Ireland are world champions!” until we knew for sure, I didn’t want to dream that was possible!
As the results came back, Charlie Richards had done brilliant also catching a bonus 4 kilo Zander to finish 5th, Rory Dunne had a tougher day coming 12th, James O’Doherty had 32 quality fish in the last hour to finish 4th.
The last result we were waiting on was Johnny McKinley and we were hoping for the best as our results were solid and if he could come half way we’d be in the medals! Brenton got the news and announced that Johnny was 5th! We’d got 29 points, one better than the first day.
England had a ridiculous day winning day two with a very low score after a difficult first day and we thought they’d possibly jump ahead of us, amongst others, but it wasn’t until Lee came down again and said he thinks Ireland have won by a point and I’d be the world champion.
It was a truly amazing feeling and the emotion really kicked in at that point as reality of the most incredible win started to dawn on us all.
All of the lads started to arrive behind my peg, and it wasn’t until the film crew arrived to film the winning team jumping in the river that I realised what we’d actually achieved as a team and it started to sink in, Ireland were World Champions.
The team medal means everything to us, and it’s the first team medal that Ireland have won away from Irish soil.
To cap that off with a double gold winning individually too, unbelievable! The reaction back home, from other anglers, family and friends has been incredible so a huge thank you to everyone and my sponsors MAP & Sensas for their amazing support.
We look forward to giving it our all once again next year in Lithuania.
