It was back to Manor Farm Leisure this Saturday for Harry’s match with 24 anglers split over the Island and Middle pools. With temperatures down and cold rain all week going in the pools, it was going to be hard. I was looking forward to fishing the rods this week as it’s not something I do much as most of the venue’s I fish are pole dominated but Manor Farm Leisure is a venue where rods do come into play and that proved the case today.

I drew on Middle pool peg 4, an end peg with a bit of form in recent weeks. The intel was to fish bomb and pellet to the right hand margin up against some reeds. So I set up my 10ft Preston mini plus bomb rod on a Preston ICS system to fish and feed 8mm pellets there. I plumbed up a couple of pole rigs for long and short lines with soft pellets and I also set up a medium 20g Preston ICS inline Banjo XR method feeder for throwing into the shallow water in the corner of the pool to my right.

Wanting to prime the bomb line and pole lines I started on the method feeder fishing Preston 2mm micro pellets and baited up with a Ringers 6mm Chocolate orange Bandum wafter and waited for the tip to pull around and 15 minutes in it did, a 2lb F1 graced the landing net. This was good news, normally when I fish the feeder if it hasn’t gone around after half an hour it’s normally thrown up the bank and I fish my pole but this first fish gave me the confidence to stay on the rods. I think I was the first angler to catch on the pool so more reason to stick on the feeder while priming that bomb line.

Several more small F1’s followed during the next hour and no one else seemed to be catching. Then I caught a Carp around 10lb. I was thinking about going on that bomb line just before I caught it, so again this made me stay on the method casting into the end of the pool. The fish seemed to be there and I continued to catch some more F1’s for the next hour but no carp. So after priming that bomb line for two hours now I felt the time was right to cast over the loose feed 8mm’s with my bomb. 10 minutes later the tip pulled around with a 2lb F1. I felt ready for some more but that was it for the next wasted 30 minutes.

So I still had feeding fish on that feeder line but to many small F1’s and I though I’d spend the next 15 minutes on the pole just to see if this was any better. I’d also been priming these pole lines for two hours and I went out to 13 metres with a soft 6mm pellet and I caught straight away, adding several more small F1’s. This was interesting as the other anglers opposite me had also been fishing poles since the start of the match but I hadn’t seem any of then catch! After 30 minutes catching these small F1’s I decided they weren’t really worth catching. Yes I was adding to my overall weight but if someone began to catch carp I would get overtaken in the match. I could see I was winning the pool now and I felt the feeder was producing better with the chance of the odd Carp. So I returned to the feeder line throwing into the end of the pool. We were going into the last couple of hours in the match now and generally if the carp feed it will later in the day.

The plan worked and I caught several more big Carp around 10lb and a few more F1’s on the feeder line. I’d pretty much binned off the pole lines now but continued to feed the bomb line but this had now just become my back up line. It turned out that the rod continued to pull around for the rest of the match and the bomb line wasn’t needed.

At the end of the match my Carp and F1’s weighed in at 81lb 12oz . I had won the pool easily with the next best weight being 30lb and with the best weight on the Island pool being 44lb I had won the match overall !

I enjoyed the day, feeder fishing isn’t something I do a lot but when that tip keeps going around, it makes a good day.

The feeder set up

I used an old Preston 10′ 6” mini plus feeder rod with 8lb mainline loaded onto a Daiwa 3012 TDR reel set up on an ICS stem with a 20g Banjo XR feeder and a size 16 Preston KKM-B 4 inch (0.17mm) hook length. Bait was sonubaits 2mm Pro Feed pellets and the hook bait was a 6mm Ringers Chocolate Orange Wafter.