This was a Bears match at Hawford Bridge over the Broomhill and Bridge pools. I drew a good peg on Bridge. A match was won off it a couple of weeks ago so I knew it’s potential in the winter. 

On plumbing up I found 6 foot of water at on my long pole line with it shallowing up to 4 foot on short pole line. I set up pole rigs for pellets and corn long. A maggot short line and the margin to my left. I started on the long pole line sprinkle cad potting in a few 4mm pellets with corn on the hook. This produced 5 or 6 carp in the first hour but as time went on the fishing began to slow down so I began to feed my short maggot line early. When I went over it no bites came. I felt the need for a change to what I was using over the long pole line. I’d caught fish there so they were definitely in the area.

I decided to fish maggots long and to catapult feed into rather than potting it in. This tactic had worked well for me a few weeks ago at Hawford on the Broomhill pool. This had an instant result, I began to catch carp quicker than before. I caught here for the rest of the match feeding maggots via the catapult every five minutes. That’s really the full story for this match I ended up stopping feeding my other lines with an hour to go. So it’s a short blog this week. I ended the match with 114lb 8oz for the win and considering it’s only the 1st week in January I was well happy to do a tonne+ weight. 

Maggot Rig – 6 foot deep. 0.6g Nick Gilbert 1.5mm tip Wire Gimp pole float set up on 0.15mm Guru N-Gauge mainline with a bulk of no.8 Stotz’s 18 inches from the hook with 3 no.10 equally spaced out dropper shot above a 6 inch size 16 0.13mm Preston GPM-B Ready Rig. Set up on 11H Preston Hollo elastic through a puller kit. 

---