With my last day of the summer holidays I was able to take in the Open at Woodland View for their mid week cost cutter match. This week spilt between Front and Back Deans. I’d not fished this pool for a year but hoped to catch a few before being back in the office tomorrow!

I drew Front Deans peg 31 an end peg today but really not where you need to be as the other end of the pool is better, but still an end peg, so all to play for! The peg has two trees either side and very close to where your sitting so I didn’t fancy the margins as I would be sat on top of any fishing fish. So I opted to fish a couple of short pole lines, hard pellets at 2+2 with a strung out rig and a bulk and droppers rig with corn and micro at 2+1 I also set up for shallow rig as back up but with the stung out rig this would tell me if the fish were up in the water.

Fishing hard pellets

I began the match on the hard pellet rig after big potting micro’s into the 2+1 for later. It was a slow start and I was just cad potting in 6mm pellets and catching a few small F1’s and the odd Skimmer and not really going anywhere. After the first couple of hours I was trying the 2+1 line with an 8mm expander hook bait where I’d topped up the micro several times but this also wasn’t really working. I needed to change something. So I began to throw 6mm’s from hand now and fished a banded 8mm on the hook and as the day progressed this line got better and better but I was also foul hooking quite a few fish. The fish weren’t on the bottom. So I began to swing the rig out keeping a tight line and feeding the 6mm’s as the hook bait sank through the water rather than feeding when the hook bait was on the bottom. This proved to work well. If I didn’t get a bite I would just repeat the process swinging out and then feeding the pellets which were sinking through the water with the hook bait.

As the day progressed this line got better and I caught steadily for the next 3 hours. Simply feeding the swim as I swung out the rig. I weighed in 81lb which was 40lb of F1’s and 40lb of carp which got me 3rd overall and a section win.

Best rig of the day

This was the strung out pellet rig which was a 4×14 Preston Carp Pellet. The 2 inch tip on this float supports an 8mm pellet hook bait without it getting dragged down. Mainline was 0.19mm with strung out no.9 shot (not stotz’s) at 3 inch gaps above the hook length. Spilt shot doesn’t move on the line and it’s much better than stotz’s for stung out rigs. The hook length was a 6in size 16 (0.16mm) Drennan Carp Bandit Pre tied rig as I was fishing for Carp and F1’s. set up on yellow 17 Preston Dura slip..