I normally get to fish Woodland pool at Trinity Waters, Somerset once a year as it’s a venue we nomally fish on our Jubilee 3 day festivals in recent years.

This is a deep pool with some really big Carp in it. At the draw a hoped for a good margin peg but I drew on the far side of the pool this time. On this side of the peg are actually pallets extended over the water. So if you want to fish the margins you are actually fishing behind yourself. The peg I drew also had both pegs each side to me very close. Catching big Carp to the margins would prove to be difficult as any large hooked carp will head straight underneath the pallets. I learnt this problem from my few visits previously to the venue.

So I ruled out margin fishing and set my stall out for catching fish straight out in front of me. 

I set up long and short pole lines, One for pellets at 13 metres and then corn left and meat to the right at 5 section of pole. If the fish were cruising up in the water I had a pellet Waggler ready and also a Bomb rod. 

At the all in and fed my pole lines and then kicked off the match on the Straight lead with an 8mm pellet. This produced a small Skimmer!! I stuck at it for another 30 minutes and then the rod pulled round and a carp around 8lb was safely deposited into one of my keep nets. Nothing else happened with either the Bomb rod or the Pellet Waggler so after I while tried the pole. 

I started feeding 6mm pellets over the 13 metre line with a 8mm pellet on the hook but this produced nothing after 30 minutes so I re fed and tried the short corn line. I began to get bites and caught a few Skimmers a nice Tench and then an eel. The carp just didn’t want to feed and most of the other anglers were also struggling apart from a couple of the noted pegs that always do OK. 

I switched to the meat line but things didn’t improve, I was just catching Silvers. So I started to rotate the poles line with little success. Then I finally hooked a large carp on the meat line. These carp fight extremely hard at Trinity and on this deep pool it take a while to get them up in the water. The problem then is stopped them swimming underneath the pallet and I lost this one under the pallet. So when I hooked my next one I had to take my time with it keeping out in the swim until it took its first gulp of air and when it was ready for the net. 

This fishing still wasn’t good for most anglers until and last “Golden” hour when the Carp began to come on the feed. I began to catch, but so did the other anglers that had been struggling. I managed to catch several more carp in the short meat line and did enough to get the all important section win with 58lb 0oz which also included 15lb of Silvers.

Meat Rig – 0.6g Nick Gilbert XT Decker HD pole float in 6 foot of water, set up on 0.17mm Guru N-Gauge mainline with a bulk of no.8 above a 6inch 0.15mm N-Gauge hook length with a size 14 Guru LWG spade end hook set up on purple Hydro.