This was an Excel AC match at Cob House and my first time on the Chestnut pool. With every other peg in I didn’t know what to expect and whether I was pegged in a good area or not but this pool is full of Carp with excellent weights in the Summer. So this was going to be an interesting one.

So having never fished this pool before, plenty of research on youtube and facebook was required the week before the match. I decided to fish a short pole and the margins but I also set up a bomb rod if I need to fish into the pool. This was going to be a carp match as there were no F1’s to fish for. So out came the summer carp rigs.

I started on hard pellets at top 2+3 which didn’t produce anything and I was soon fishing with off my topkit+1 with 6mm Sonubaits Pro Expanders as hook bait and feeding fishery micro’s. It was still hard going but I did catch two Carp here for 15lb during next hour but it was clear I needed to do thing else. I changed to feeding 4.5mm feed pellets hoping to draw in some of the big carp but I had no luck. I then tried maggots but still no luck so my thoughts went to feeding the left margin.

Carp are attracted to the ground bait and they will come in and feed confidently if the area is primed. So I left it for 20 minutes while fishing elsewhere with the soft pellets The problem with a lot of ground baits that people use for catching carp in the margins is they are too light and don’t contain enough feed to keep the fish feeding, this ground bait not only draws the carp to the margins but also keeps them there and even if the fish kicks up the ground bait, the majority of it will drop back down in the same area rather than being washed away. I was going to fish 5 dead red maggots on the hook as a stand out bait and why a also fed the dead reds with the ground bait.

This is where I stayed for the rest of the match, topping up the margin with ground bait and dead reds every 5 minutes with a small cad pot and I managed to add several more Carp. This was enough to come 2nd overall in the match with 65lb 8oz.

I must add you have to use fishery keepnets and landing nets at Cob House, So always check for holes in the keep nets and the landing nets are quite shallow which means you have to be very careful when unhooking big carp in these nets as they can easily jump out the landing net. I thought the Chestnut pool was a really good with some big carp in there and in the Summer I can see why they get big weights in the matches they hold on it.

Best Rig of the day

This was the margin rig which was geared up for catching Carp in 18 inches of water. I used a 4×14 inline Preston Edge pole float on 0.19mm mainline with a bulk of shots above a 4 inch hook length (a cut down 6 inch size 14 0.17mm XSH Preston Ready Rig) Elastic was 19 Orange Preston Dura Slip for hit and hold tactics and not to waste time playing fish.