This year's event was held on three venues, the River Issjel, the Ganzendeip Canal and the Blackwater Canal.

Now for those of you reading this that have never had the "Holland Experience", allow me to give you a brief description of each of the venues so that you can see just how 'unusual' each of the venues really are.

The River Issjel is a very powerful river roughly 150m wide and with an average depth of 4m. To fish the river you require feeders with lead on up to 120grams. 13ft rods, heavy line and strong hooks are the order of the day as the species range from small roach to large bream (up to 4kg!) and even larger barbel! In a typical 5 hour match you can put up to 8 pints of caster through the feeder.

The Ganzendeip Canal is a shipping canal approximately 80m wide and in excess of 7m deep! It is stuffed full of quality roach (and Pike & Zander!) and is gin clear. To successfully complete on the venue you are required to fish the pole and whips between 4 and 6m with rigs from 1-4 grams and be very aggressive with your feeding. This year we were feeding 6 pints of caster and 3 kg of groundbait.

The Blackwater canal is another shipping canal slightly wider than the Ganzendeip at around 120m. It is similar in depth and has a lot more colour and flow. The main methods are long and short pole and the feeder fished at around one third of the way across. Pole floats ranging from 1-4 grams are the order of the day and generally you will feed slightly less caster and slightly more groundbait as the main species are bream, ide and roach.

This year's event was a huge success and competing for the coveted title of NATO Champs were 7 teams. MAVER ROYAL NAVY, RAF GARBOLINO, ARMY VESPE, OLD LAGS, DSRA BLACK, DSRA WHITE AND TEAM NETHERLANDS.

The MAVER ROYAL NAVY team arrived in Holland a few days early with the majority of the Squad to allow us to practice each of the venues and come up with the all-important team plan. This year we travelled with our strongest possible team of 6, three Bootnecks and three Matelots. The booty's included WO1 RSM Steve Shepherd, Sgt Ads Palmer (Capt) and Cpl Craig Tucker. The Matelots were CPO's Nick Jones and Keith Masheeder and PO Alan Jones.

After winning the first two days outright as a team we knew we had got it right. By the end of the week we recorded 3 team wins and 3 team seconds! We walked away with the title by 7 points, had 4 of the 6 anglers in the top 10, with CPO Keith Masheeder finishing highest in 2nd place overall. We had the winning pairs, as well as overall 5th and 7th place, had 4 anglers in the top 5 on the Blackwater, 5 in the first 12 on the Ganzendeip and 3 anglers in the top 10 individually on the River Issjel!!!