7th January and a Happy New Year to you all!

The highlight of my festive fishing season is my club's annual Chub Cup, which some people think is a daft idea for a primarily fly-fishing game-fishing club to have! But there is a good reason behind this.

Besides salmon, sea trout, brown trout and grayling, the Ribble and Hodder have a good head of chub and (since they were introduced in the 1970s) barbel. The thing is that, by our fly-fishing, we really have no idea of the populations of these fish and some of us think that we should. So about five years ago a group of us inaugurated the Chub Cup to monitor them in our beats. Only baits that will not catch our beloved normal quarry are permitted (bread, cheese and luncheon meat) and we hold the event on the Hodder the first Saturday of the New Year.

The fishers fish 10am - 2pm (I am umpire and judge, so I don't get my hands dirty and slimy) and each is given a piece of string before he sets off (no lady members have yet taken part). When they catch a chub (or barbel), the end of the piece of string is held to the fish's nose and a knot tied at the fork of the tail. At the end of the event, everyone announces their catch, but the winner is the one whose knot is furthest from the end of the string. In other words, it's not how many you catch, but the biggest.

This year, most caught at least one chub, but barbel failed to show, and the winner was Ken with a string length about 2mm longer than everyone else's (in truth, all the chub caught were almost the same size and weighed around the three-pounds in weight). Ken gets the Chub Cup for 2004, plus a bottle, and we all had a very sociable day out, talking of salmon, sea trout and brown trout. Incidentally, one member fished fly for a short time and had a grayling on a heavy Bug, before someone made him leger luncheon meat at the end of his fly leader!