31 October 2021

Member Updates

Member Update 2 – 31/10/2021

We said last week that there are a number of changes coming next year and to reduce information overload, we’d break it down into smaller chunks for members.

From 2022, everyone fishing on WADAA waters will require either a day ticket or membership. Currently, we allow juniors who accompany a paying day-ticket angler to fish for free, whilst members can only take a junior as a taster and further visits for juniors means taking out junior membership.

However, this causes us a number of problems:

  1. It undermines our own junior angling membership with some juniors taking an annual membership while others fish for free.
  2. It makes bailiffing really difficult – it is almost impossible to identify if people have the correct tickets and we sometimes get numbers of anglers fishing under 1 ticket.
  3. It makes it very difficult to manage the number of fish taken (on game waters) as fish can be passed between anglers.
  4. We have no record of who is fishing on venues that can have health and safety implications and have no method to cross-check to catch returns.

As a result, from 2022, all anglers fishing, at any time, will require a valid ticket. This can either be an annual membership, or a day ticket.

In order to prevent this from becoming a barrier to encouraging young anglers into the sport (the very last thing we want to do), the costs of junior tickets will be heavily discounted and to aid convenience, will be available easily from the website.

Member Update 1 – 25/10/2021

The club Directors and staff have been working incredibly hard in preparation for some really exciting developments for members as we move into 2022.
Some of these are a bit complicated, so instead of lumping loads of information out in 1 go, we’ll try and break it up into bite-size chunks.

2022 Memberships

One of the things that will be changing is our membership offering. From next year there will be a choice of 3 membership types:

  • Full (game and coarse)
  • Game Only
  • Coarse Only

Pricing will be graded from coarse to full as previously. Details on pricing will be released after the AGM.

The reason for doing this is it gives us a much better insight into who is fishing where and will help us allocate the appropriate investment to each discipline. Currently, we don’t know how many Full Members are actually game only.