Back to basics

Peg 30 on the match lake.After a quick walk around the lake I decided to sit myself down on peg thirty just by the entrance to the match lake. I was at the wrong end really because the wind had been blowing into the bottom end all week, taking a lot of fish with it. I could see plenty of them just lazing under the surface, but I really couldn’t be bothered to carry my gear down there, so peg thirty would have to do. Besides, I had plenty of open water in front of me to draw fish from. Also, practising somewhere different is far more advantageous, because come match day you could draw anywhere & we teach ourselves nothing if we sit our backsides on flyers all the time.

Peg 30 on the match lake.

My main method of attack today would be the long pole on the deck with banded hard coarse pellet over loose fed coarse pellet. All the fish in these lakes love pellets but feeding & presentation are the keys to getting the most out of any peg & often it is a case of rotating two or three swims. Today however I was confident I could keep the bites coming from just one swim.

Bait, good old Skretting's 6mm pellets.

Rig for the day. I had about four & a half feet of water on a gentle slope at thirteen meters. Rig would be a Sensas Desque .20g fished dead depth. This is a lovely little float for the pellet. Its slim body profile offers very little resistance. It is slightly delicate for the rigours of carp fishing, so I give it the hard as nails treatment to toughen it up a bit. This would be attached to .18 Ultima power plus & attached to this would be a hook length of .14 Bayer perlon & a spade end, size sixteen, kamasan B911. Two number eight’s just above the hook length knot & a single number nine dropper finishing of the rig.

Sensas Desque .30grm.


Big F1!




My ever dependable Trabucco GM Carp 1.

A chunky Common.

After about ten minutes of first putting in I hit my first carp, a nice common of about two pounds. Bites were coming regularly by feeding just six to eight pellets over the top with a catty.

This Gobio Gobio was a bit keen!

During the next couple of hours some nice skimmers, brown goldfish & some chunky F1’s made an appearance before the carp really got their heads down. Simply lifting & dropping the rig every now & again to work the bait saw the odd carp hit the bait as it fell, resulting in them hooking themselves, which was a bonus. Resisting the temptation to over feed kept the fish near/on the deck with just the odd foul hooker.

Latex!! Awesom stuff.

I am running latex through all of my top kits now & today I was using 1.4mm through a match kit of my GM Carp 1 pole. Removing the number one section & bushing the number two section. For a carp pole it really is a delight to use. I am totally sold on Latex & use the Garbolino brand. It’s possible to subdue fish on it so quickly that even the chunky mirrors & commons take less than a minute to land. The just do not pull back on it.

A chunky goldfish.

After about 3 hours I decided I would give the ‘hook in the loop’ method a bit of a practise. I haven’t really fished this method a great deal so wanted to get to grips with the bites or in my case the missed bites that I seem to suffer from. First put in with a new HITL & the float buried instantly. Shortly after a nice common hit the net, followed by some more brown goldfish & more carp. It really is a deadly method, bites are so positive. I am still not 100% certain I understand what is happening with the hook, but sure enough just about every fish was hooked in the top lip. I did inexplicably miss probably 1 in 3 bites, but that just seems to be part of it. I suppose at the end of the day as long as its productive then there isn’t really a need to know what is happening exactly, the double bulk has got to play a big role, as has having the second bulk so close to the hook.So there we have it, all in all a very productive day. I have finished up with over 25 carp, some skimmers & goldfish for about fifty pounds in four to five hours. Obviously it is always different come match day, but as the season progresses & the water cools, these methods are going to play a big part in proceedings. I am really pleased I practised them today with such good results; it can only be good for the confidence.

Top lip, a common feature of the HITL