Round 4 of the Tirley Court Orchard pool winter league saw the pool bursting its banks on a few pegs at the top end of the pool. We’d had rain, rain and more rain in the week the the pool was full with chocolate brown water coming off the fields. But on the plus side temperatures had been on the up so it was going to be interesting to see how the pool would fish.

I just wanted to draw a peg that wasn’t flooded over the banks. I didn’t fancy wading out in the standing water looking for the pool edge. Luckily for me the peg I drew was OK which was on the first bank and the extra water on the pool wasn’t to bad. The other side of the pool is where you want to be at this time of the year, but being a league my section was all along this bank so I was just looking for good section points anyway.

As you may know if you have been following my blogs on this league, the Orchard pool contains just Carp, no Silvers or F1’s to fish for so being a winter league and still in February, it would either fish or not. I planned to fish hard and soft pellets with corn as my back up bait. With it being mild I felt the Carp would feed despite the cold water going in all week.

With calm conditions it seemed fine to start on a soft 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expander as hook bait fished with a bulk and one dropper while feeding hard 4mm’s via a cad pot. I hooked one Carp after 10 minutes but lost it at the net. The difficultly today was the chocolate brown colour of the water when playing fish. You just couldn’t see them just under the water surface and I had to gauge where the fish was when trying to net them. After several attempts to net this fish the hook pulled out. No more bites followed on this line so I opened up a corn line to my left next, cad potting a few grains of corn and 4mm pellets and I caught a carp here after 5 minutes. I thought corn was the forward but no more fish came my way and I returned to the soft pellet line. This time it was much better and I had a nice run of fish here for the next hour catching 6 more carp but losing several because of the difficultly with netting them in the coloured water.

Then the wheels fell off. I couldn’t get a bite for the next 1.5 hours! Water had been gushing into the pool from a pipe in the corner of the pool all morning and I plumbed up again just to see if that extra water meant I needed to adjust my rigs, but they were fine. I changed to banded hard pellet with a strung out rig next but I still couldn’t get a bite. So began to feed my left margin with mirco’s and began to feed hard 6mm’s on a 2+1 line straight in front of me. Nothing was in the margin yet so I tied the 2+1 line with the strung out hard pellet rig. I was now feeding 6mm’s by hand now hoping the noise would draw in some carp. It was long before I was getting inductions and finally caught a couple more carp on hard pellets. But also loosing a couple due to the netting problem, but I now had 9 carp with a couple of hours to go. I felt the noise of the pellets had helped and I began to throw 4mm’s by hand into the margin and 30 minutes later I went over it potting micro’s in and loose feeding 4mm’s over the top. I caught a carp straight away with an 6mm expander and so now I had 10 carp with 40 minutes to go. This margin dweller gave me the confident to finish off the match on the margin line and I had a couple of foul hookers next so I stopped feeding the mirco’s but continued to feed the 4mm’s by hand. I added another 3 more carp here and finished up with 13 carp.

These 13 carp weighed in 84lb 8oz and was enough to get a default section win and 2 points in the league. The match was won from the other bank as expected with 119lb and 2nd place was in my section from peg 2 who had caught all day with 108lb. So I was happy to get the section default money. That 1.5 hours in the match biteless and the several lost carp due to the difficultly in netting fish had cost me today. I think I should have done the tonne today. So despite all the water going into the pool during the week it actually fished OK and it was nice to finally be able to feed a bit of bait now. I’m on 7 points overall for the league now with two rounds left to go, so all to play for and with the weather warming up I can’t wait for the next round in a couple of weeks.

Best rig of the day

I caught on different rigs and baits today but the bulk of my weight came from fishing a 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expander. The rig was strong due to I was fishing just for carp and was a 4×14 Preston online Diamond set up with 0.19mm mainline with a bulk 18 inch from the hook with one dropper shot. Hook length was a 6 inch Preston size 16 (0.15mm) XSH Ready rig. Set up with Preston yellow 17 Dura Slip elastic.