It was back to Hillview after a few weeks away from the venue for the Saturday Open this time. A nice day was forecasted and both pools Moorhen and Heron were in this time.

It was a short walk to peg 22 on the Heron pool for me this week as its just a short walk with the trolley from the car park. at the bottom of the pool. A peg that has great margins and its a fairly shallow peg on my short pole line and with the weather warming up I hoped the fish would be in this shallow water so I planned the attack fishing short and the margin with no real need to go long this week.

Starting on pellets

At the all in a began fishing a 6mm hard pellet over micro’s and a few 4mm over the top at a top kit +3. It was a slow start, catching a couple of F1’s and a few small stockies and Skimmers on the first 40 minutes but it just didn’t seem right and I quickly came shorter on to my Top kit + 1 line doing the same but with a soft 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expander as hook bait this time and I began catching some better sized F1’s around 3lb, so moving in closer to the bank seemed the better option doing the same, feed micro via a small pole pot and loose feeding 4mm’s over the top. This was good for the next 40 minutes, catching around 20lb but the line was slowing down, So I played around with different hook baits, trying corn and meat but this was pretty much the same response from the fish. So as I had a good margin I cupped in big pot of mirco’s with the intention of trying it in 10 minutes.

Into the left margin early

These margins at Hillview can be match winners at this time of the year and if the fish come in early and if you can catch them you can really do a good weight and 2 hours into the match I hoped they would be there. First put in with an 8mm Pro Expander produced a carp straight away around 6lb, great I thought, Bagging time, but this must have been a loaner, I struggled to get another bite despite trying, smaller 6mm’s. I opted for a gamble and big potted in some more micro but this time with a good handful of corn and returned to the short pellet line for 10 minutes. Then back in the margin this time with double corn as hook bait. Nothing happened!

Changing to meat

So back to the short pole but this time I switched to a new 2+1 line to my right with 6mm meat, feeding a small cad pot over the top. I got a response straight away, A carp around 4lb and then another soon after that but then nothing. So this got me thinking about using meat in the margin. So back in the margin with meat next. Bingo, I began to catch Carp and F1’s with the meat. Although that corn and micro I’d put in had brought them in at wasn’t working as a hook bait. They didn’t seem to want corn hook bait today. So for the rest of the match I alternated between the margin and the new short top kit + 1 line with meat. Hoping to catch more in the margin but I was just picking up the odd carp and F1 in the margin so I rotated between these lines until the all out.

De-fault Section win

I weighed in 85lb 6oz and this was enough to pick up a default section win as the match winner was in my section. He’d caught 205lb and blitzed the match. There was another 100lb+ weight on my pool (Heron) an there were also a couple of 100lb+ from he Moorhen pool as well, so the complex had fished good all round. I was lucky to pick up the section this week. I had been sat in the shade all day and everybody else fished in warm sunny conditions, maybe the water in my peg was just a little to colder to compete with the other pegs but I was happy I got the default section win anyway and Mrs S’s takeaway that night was all paid for!

Best rigs of the day

These were the two rigs I used catching on meat. The top kit line was a 4×12 Preston Diamond set up on 0.19mm mainline with a bulk and two droppers in 3 foot of water. with a pretied 6inch Preston size 14 XSH-B ready rig set up in 17 yellow Dura slip and the margin was a 4×14 Preston Edge in 2 foot of water again set up on 0.19mm mainline but with a bulk of no.8’s above a cut down 4inch size 14 Preston XSH-B ready rig, on 17 Dura Slip though a Garbolino Margin short margin kit.

These short margin kits make it so much easier landing big carp than a standard power kit.