The Big Lerf Fundraiser 2024 was our best yet, with more participants and money raised for charity than ever before. Through ticket sales and donations, we raised over £1900 for our two charities, which was kindly topped up by Tacklewave Ltd Japanese Tackle Distributor to get to £2000! Thank you to everyone that helped us raise such a great total for our chosen charities – Prostate Cancer UK and Julia’s House.

As always, our events are very much about celebrating the social side of LRF and from what we saw and heard, this was very much the case again. We did of course have prizes to be won too though and this was battled out keenly with the result coming down to the wire yet again.

Eventually, the species Jedi, Will Pender came out on top in the most species category and he did it in style, catching connemara clingfish and even better, a snake pipefish amongst his winning species tally.

The top 5 ended of looking like this

Most Species
1st Will Pender 12
2nd Matt Barnsley 11
3rd Donny Midas 10 (higher placed due to rarer species)
4th Lucas Theocharides 10
5th James Dobie 9 (higher placed due to rarer species).

The juniors also fought out a tight battle and the front runners managed some really impressive totals that would have seen them in the top 5 in the seniors category! Callum Moyle was a newcomer to our events, and it came as a pleasant surprise to see him come out on top with an impressive 11 species.

Most Species Junior
1st – Callum Moyle 11 Species
2nd Reuben Judge 10 Species
3rd Aaron Chambers 9 Species (higher placed due to rarer species)
4th Tom Baron 9 Species
5th Roscoe Dolbear 8 Species (higher placed due to rarer species)

Our coolest fish winner was an easy one to pick this year, as Mark Brindley caught a stunning male black faced blenny, a super rare and highly priced catch and a first ever for any of our competitions!

Coolest fish winner
Mark Brindley
Black faced blenny

The longest fish category was an interesting one this year, with little in the way of pelagic action, it was actually a pout that won it for Tim Brewer, at 24cm it was a really decent LRF fish and much bigger than the majority of the many pout we’d see during the day! We have to give a shout out to Audrius Palaima here, as he did catch a very nice ballan, which would have won, had he not forgotten to include a lure in shot in all the excitement.

Longest fish
Tim Brewer
24cm pout

The smallest fish prize was fittingly won by Max Goodwin, who deliberately targeted
his tiny rock goby using one of his Tanago rods

Smallest fish
Max Goodwin
3cm rock goby

The winner of most species on unscented lures was Nathan Patrick, who stuck to his task admirably in less than favourable conditions to end up with 3 species on 3 different unscented lures.

Most Species On Unscented (Non-Aqua) Lures
Nathan Patrick
3 species

Winning prizes were kindly donated by the following sponsors:
Tacklewave LTD UK, HTO, Not Guilty Press, Streetfishing London, C.A.N Fishing Lures, Sjors Waterschoot, On The Drop, Jonny Lerfer, Weymouth Angling Centre (Courtesy of the Dorset Lure Club) and Tanagomax

We were kept very busy logging catches throughout the day and must thank Ben’s brother, Olly for his help with that job, it would’ve been a real struggle without him!

We logged catches from 9am-6pm and saw a total of 20 species caught with 409 individual catches recorded and a total of 78 anglers registering at least one fish.

The species caught and number of each logged were

66 pouting
54 pollack
54 black goby
53 rock goby
47 corkwing wrasse
42 tompot blenny
31 common blenny
23 black bream
10 ballan wrasse
8 goldsinny wrasse
6 sand goby
3 long spined sea scorpion
3 sand smelt
2 common goby
2 common dragonet
1 black faced blenny
1 baillons wrasse
1 connemara clingfish
1 leopard spotted goby
1 snake pipefish

Outside of the catches we also saw some fine litter collecting by our competitors. We believe anglers get an unfair reputation as anti-social and uncaring about the environment. This couldn’t be further from the case, especially when it comes to The Big Lerf Fundraiser.

Not only content with raising thousands for the charities, our anglers also removed crabbing nets and litter from Weymouth harbour.

Intentionally or not, lots of these nets end up in the harbour and often stay there for years. We are proud to say plenty were hauled up and binned on that Saturday, top work everyone!

A sincere thank you to all who took part, to our incredible sponsors, and finally to our most generous hosts Weymouth Angling Society.