This Sunday I joined some of the Moaning Sods AC lads for a small knock up match on the Orchard pool at Tirley Court. I was keen to go as I’m booked in for the forth coming winter league early in the New Year and I wanted to gauge how the venue fishes in the winter months. I’ve only fished the Orchard pool in the summer. Its all carp on this venue, no Silvers or F1’s so its a little different to the venues I would normally fish. So would the carp still feed at this time of the year?

Weather wise it was a blustery day but mild conditions with a strong breeze blowing left to right up to peg 1 in the top corner by the entrance gate. Fishing a long pole wasn’t an option today, so I set up only two pole rigs, one on a top kit + 1 line and then one for the right hand margin to my right so I could fish with the wind off my back. If the fish were going to be in the middle of the pool I also set up a feeder rod on a Preston ICS system so I could alternate between a small method or a maggot feeder and this is where I started my match after cupping in some bait on the top kit line with the intention of dropping on this line after an hour.

The feeder proved none productive and after a biteless 40 minutes throwing around the peg I decided on a early look on the short pole line with corn. This wasn’t good and it took another 30 minutes before my first carp graced the keepnet. Things weren’t looking good but at least it was the same for all the other anglers. I expected the carp to come on the feed at some point but two hours into the match and I had hooked two carp and landed just the one. So I began to fish the margin with dead red maggots and despite one swirl from one big carp here, again this proved biteless. I was going know where in the match. Time for change!

Soft pellet fishing

I had live maggots on the bait tray but opted to give soft pellets a go first. I started with a 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expander hook bait and began to feed hard 4mm pellets from my hand, thinking I needed to create some noise to bring carp into the peg. This was a game changer and after little while I began to catch carp, some of them were a really good stamp of fish and I was now building a weight. The Pro Expanders were working well.

I had a fantastic couple of hours fishing these Pro Expanders while hand feeding a few hard 4mm pellets over the top. I caught carp from 4lb to 10lb using them. The bites were very slight and my float tip needed to be dotted right down to hit the bites today though. Going into the last hour things were slowing down and I tried the margin again with dead red maggots but it wasn’t any good and I was soon back out on the short pole line as before. I tried changing to corn as hook bait which caught a couple more but the soft pellets were much better today. I did slow down the feed pellets at this point which seemed to bring more bites and I finished off the match strongly with the soft pellets.

Come the all out I knew I’d done well with a good chance of framing. The anglers opposite me had also caught well and I placed 171lb 4oz on the scales which easily beat the best weight of 70lb so far. Whatever was the out come I was happy anyway. I’d had a great days fishing and to catch over 150lb in November can’t be argued with. It turned out that one of the other anglers opposite had won the match with 180lb so I was 2nd overall and only a couple of decent carp off winning the match. But as I said it had been a great days fishing. Tirley Court is an awesome venue!!

Best rig of the day

I was only fishing for carp today. There are no Silvers or F1’s in the Orchard pool at Tirley Court so my set up needed to be strong and up to the job. You don’t want to lose any big carp. So my short pole line was a 4×14 Preston inline Diamond pole float in 4 foot of water, set up on 0.19mm mainline with a bulk of no.9 stotz’s 12 inches from the hook with one no.10 dropper shot above a 6inch Preston Pre-tied size 14 XSH Ready rig. With a yellow 17 Preston Dura Slip elastic.