I’d not been to Hillview for a while so I was looking forward to a spot of F1 fishing and the weather forecast looked great for a sun tan but with the the Carp and F1’s also enjoying the weather I hoped they weren’t spawning!

On arrival at the fishery the word was the carp were really thrashing around the reeds in the margins on the canals but not much on the Moorhen pool. I drew peg 9 so all good. I could see carp in the margins so I planned a short pole match, setting up rigs for 2+2 and 2+1 plus the margin down to my left. I fed micro and corn here straight from the all-in but thought I would start on hard pellets on the 2+2 line first just to get the carp in the margin time to settle on the bait.

The hard pellet line produced two or three F1’s early on but this petered out and all I could catch here were silvers. so I soon came short with meat and pellets looking for F1’s but again all I could catch was silver fish. But these silvers were worth fishing for while to carp and F1’s weren’t feeding. I caught some quality Roach, Skimmers and Ide. I was building a nice silver fish weight but I really needed some Carp and F1’s so after enjoying catching these silver fish for probably to long as I was ignoring the margin with potential carp and tried there next. I caught a few F1’s here on corn and micro pellets but most of my fish were silvers again. The carp and F1’s didn’t really switch on until the last hour of the match.

It was an enjoyable days fishing despite the Carp and F1’s not really wanting to feed, but those silvers went to 39lb and the F1’s I caught later on in the match give in 82lb 3oz which was enough for 3rd place.

Best Rig of the day

I caught the bulk of my 39lb of Skimmers, Roach and Ide on the bottom in 5 foot of water using a 4×14 Preston F1 Pellet pole float tied up on 0.17mm mainline with a strung out reverse tapered rig with a 6 inch size 14 GPM (0.13mm) Ready rig. Using 13 white Preston Dura Slip. fishing various baits such as 6mm soft pellets, meat and corn.