With a week off work I had the opportunity to fish Manor Farm Leisure’s affordable open on the Thursday. The match was on the Island pool and I drew peg 16
I don’t fish Manor that often even though its on my door step so peg 16 didn’t mean much to me but it gives me the opportunity to get the rods out which something I don’t fish a lot. So I set up a couple of rods, Method feeder to fish over to the island. Bomb and pellet mid away across by the aerator which made an excellent marker to feed pellets and the right hand margin up against the yellow flag iris’s. I did set up my pole with a few shallow rigs as an option if it was going to be a shallow F1 day.
I started of on the method feeder throwing a 30g Preston ICS Banjo XR feeder loaded micro pellets and a 6mm Ringers Wafter. (yellow was best) as hook bait on the Preston 4 inch size 14 KKM-B Banded hair rig. This produced a great start after 30 minutes and after a few chucks to the island, The rod pulled around and soon a 10lb Carp graced my landing net. Having caught this bonus fish early I stayed on the feeder for the next 45 minutes while feeding the Bomb line with a few 8mm pellets and casters shallow on the long pole line. The feeder only produced a few Skimmers and I change was needed.
While fishing the feeder to the island I’d been feeding a few 8mm pellets over to the aerator so I tried this next but I had no pulls on that and 30 minutes later I tried my shallow pole line with casters. This was just producing Skimmers so after 40 minutes trying shallow I began alternating between the method and bomb lines, just adding odd Skimmer and F1. So my thoughts began on feeding the margin. I fed a couple of big pots of Sonubaits Super Crush Margin Carp with a few dead red maggots, left it to settle and returned to the bomb line. This produced a couple more F1’s but not great so I went shallow again on the pole but this time I caught a couple more F1’s. I felt more would come shallow but after 30 minutes they didn’t so my thoughts returned to the margin for the last hour.
So I fed another big pot of Groundbait with a few dead red maggots again and after 15 minutes I tried it. First put in and I hooked another big Carp around 8lb so I binned off all the other lines and focused on the margin and during this last hour I went on to catch several more F1’s and the odd Carp until the end of the match.
Today was a day for chopping and changing all day. I caught on all the methods I tried but I just couldn’t put a run of fish together until the margin in the last hour. But that last hour in the margin got me 2nd overall in the match and only a few ounces away from the winner. I just needed one for fish !!
Best Rig of the day
This was the margin rig in about 2 foot of water where a fished a 4×14 Preston Carp Shallow pole float on 0.17mm mainline with a small bulk of stotz’s above a cut down to 4 inches Preston size 12 XSH Ready rig. Baited with 5 dead red maggot’s. I fished 13 Preston Dura slip through a short margin top kit. Which is fairly light for margin work but through a short kit it really lets the hooked carp swim off with out disturbing other feeding fish before powering up.
