Having to drop the Mrs off at Evesham Station for a girlie day out in London I needed to stay local this Sunday so I went to Manor Farm Leisure for their Sunday Open match, held on the island pool this week. Manor can be a rod venue and I fancied a day on the rods as I don’t fish with them much. However today saw the short pole become the best tactic for me on the day.
The set up was simple, Starting on the method feeder throwing over to the island while a feeding a bomb line out to my right hand into the middle of the pool and if needed 3 pole lines. long and short lines and one for the margins. The first hour produced two F1’s fishing a medium 30g Preston ICS Banjo XR method feeder baited up with micro pellets and a various 6mm Bandums. So after this hour I was straight on the bomb line fishing a Preston 30g match cube baited with a 8mm pellet. My pre-match Intel was the peg next door had caught well on 8mm pellets the day before feeding 6mm’s over the top into the middle of the pool. So I hoped the same would happen today. I never had a bite after 30 minutes trying. I needed some fish in the keep nets, so I tried the pole next. although it was a nice day it can be windy at Manor farm so I’d been feeding a short pole line with 4mm Dynamite Swim Stim F1 sweet low feed pellets.
I’d been cupping these 4mm F1 sweet pellets in and I soon got a bite but the fish broke my 0.11mm hook length so I put on a 0.13mm hook length but still a size 16 Preston GPM hook hoping for more bites. I had a 4mm Soft Sonubaits Pro Expander on the hook as I was hoping for a few F1’s rather than silver fish and this combination began to work better then the feeder and bomb lines. I was now catching a odd F1. I did have to wait for the bites but I only caught a few Silvers here so the soft pellets as hook bait was working well and targeting the F1’s. I did have a look on my long pole line with corn which produced one F1 but the short line was much better and as the day progressed I was able to loose feed the pellets in here rather than cupping them in just to make a bit of noise to attract the F1’s. I did try the bomb line again but again nothing pulled the rod around and I spent the rest of the match on this short pole line. I finished up with 46lb which was enough for 3rd place overall.
Best Rig of the day
This was the short pole line where I had 6 foot of water so I fished a Preston 4×16 F1 Pellet pole float because of it’s wire stem to combat the wind on 0.17mm mainline which had a bulk of no.8’s 18 inches from the hook with a no.10 dropper 6 inches above the hook length which was a Preston size 16 (0.13mm) GPM Ready rig. Set up with Preston white 13 Dura Slip.
Phil Seedhouse match angler 