It was back to the Orchard pool at Tirley Court this week for a small Club match, not been here for some time. I drew the peg where I set my current PB match weight of 253lb a couple of years ago and at the draw the fish where already swirling in the margins, so I hoped for another great days fishing.

The Orchard pool at Tirley like the other lake there, Pete’s, it’s an out and out big weight Carp venue where you are just fishing for carp. So it was out with the Margin pool today with strong Carp rigs on. I set up just 3 rigs for hard pellets at 2+2. Soft expanders at a top kit + 1 and one margin rig for both margins as it was the same depth either side of me at about 15 inches.

Even though the Carp were in the margins from the off I wanted to feed some bait before fishing for them so I started the match on the hard pellet rig and I caught some carp here in the first 30 minutes but as we all know when you see Carp in the margins you just can’t help yourself and you have to fish there. I’d been feeding 6mm pellets there for 30 minutes hoping they will be settled on the bait now and I started fishing for them.

I had a great 2 hours here catching carp on a 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expander as hook bait while feeding 6mm hard pellets by hand to create noise. The fishing was fantastic and I soon filled up two keep nets during this next couple of hours. I was thinking, Christ I’ve only brought 5 keep nets with me and would I have enough!! But as the sun came out the fishing slowed down and my catch rate had really dropped back. The pellet attack wasn’t bringing in the Carp now. So I changed to the other right hand margin feeding ground bait with dead maggots as hook bait. I caught one or two here but it wasn’t really working. So as I already had a good weight I decided to put 3 big pots of micro’s in to my left where I’d caught well. Things improved here and I did catch some Carp but it was never really the same as earlier in the match before the sun came out. I was now scratching around for bites rotating either margin and the other two lines out into the pool. But as the match drew to a close I was only adding the odd Carp. The last hour just produced two carp. It was a real struggle but it was the same of all the other anglers. Orchard pool can switch off and it did today.

Come the weigh in I’d only ended up with 3 keep nets in the water, when earlier in the day I was thinking, would the 5 keep nets I had be enough! These 3 keepnets weighed in at 154lb 11oz which was still a great days fishing and I was 4th overall. If those fish had kept coming all day I would have pushed that PB that’s for sure !! But that’s why its called fishing and not catching!

Best rig of the day

This was the margin rig which was a Preston 4×14 Inline Edge pole float set up on. 0.19mm mainline with a small bulk of no.9’s above a size 12 (0.17mm) Preston XSH ready rig cut down to 4 inches. Using Preston 19 Orange Dura Slip elastic though a standard top kit.