Massimo Vezzalini has won the Italian Feeder Championship after a tense match on the Fissero Canal, as our Italian correspondent, Matteo Maggi, reports.

The Final of the Italian Feeder Championship could perhaps not be described as a beautiful match from a technical point of view. For four and a half hours of the competition, 85% of the competitors had caught very little. Just one little skimmer or a few little ruffe was all a number of people had to show.

The last half an hour was better, however, and proved really decisive with some anglers catching five, six or seven fish to turn their fortunes around.

This event was unfortunately postponed a month but FIPSAS, the governing body, was determined for the event to go ahead. However, the arrival of the first frost and minimum temperatures close to zero, the Fissero Canal would not produce a lot of smiles, other than the early pegs near the dock where there was a better chance of a few bites.

During the Friday and Saturday practice days the sport was very sporadic when the sun was high in the sky, but this changed dramatically when the light faded and the fish suddenly became more active. Hence the sensible decision to delay the start from 10am to 11am.

Early in the match everything was as anglers expected. Blank, blank, blank, ruffe, blank, two ruffe, blank, three ruffe, 10 ruffe, 20 ruffe, blank, a little skimmer… This was a summary report after the first two hours of fishing!

Taking pictures of people catching fish was a real feat and just 30 grams was a success for most anglers. This situation saw several big names in Italian feeder fishing in difficulty. They all found themselves having to hope to catch something of any size. Among these were the first eight on the overall leaderboard, including the tournament leader, Massimo Vezzalini of Team Mogliano Preston.

The biggest show took place in the first five pegs of the field, who each battled with bream between 200g and 1kg. While all the other anglers were using ultra thin lines and trying to scratch for bites with one or two bloodworm, these five anglers could fish fish stronger 0.12mm lines or more with dead white or red maggots. In short, the same competition was like two completely different worlds!

After a magnificent race, the first section was won by Cristian Gadda of I Diavoli Maver of Turin, totaling over 8.5kg. That also earned him the silver medal overall.

Cristian was actually looking like being crowned the Italian Champion for most of the competition. That was before the sunset, which brought the dawn of Massimo Vezzalini! The ‘Vez’ is highly regarded as a top feeder fisherman in Italy and took advantage of the arrival of the shade on the channel to capture six bream for 1.66kg. That was sufficient for a section win that sealed overall victory with close to a perfect score with 4.5 penalty points. His patience paid off as he took home the Italian title over a series of challenging rounds.

With this competition the feeder match season is now over, but already I think 2015 will be full of news!

Report by Matteo Maggi, fishingmania.it