Lee Kerry’s winning match tips
Match carp or small fish? Lee Kerry and his squad-mates plan for both options...
The challenge of international competitions is something that drives me on in match fishing.
When anglers from different countries fish together, you can see the styles come together and, although often very different, they can lead to very similar results.
This was certainly the case on my trip to the Daiwa WalterLand Feeder Masters event on Hungary’s Szeged Rowng Course.
Tamas Walter does a terrific job organising this with his team, so it was an honour to have a Preston Innovations team invited from the UK.
Our team consisted of Graham West, Mick Vials, Will Freeman and me, and after our 1,300-mile journey we arrived at the venue to be greeted by blue skies and not a breath of wind.
This meant enjoyable late October temperatures but, as we all know, these aren’t the best conditions for feeder fishing…
We had two days’ practice to try and get our heads around likely targets. What was incredibly interesting was that this venue had been drained and refilled with water only months before, and as a result there were two types of fish.
First, carp. Carp are easy to come by in Hungary, and they had put more than 30 tonnes back into the venue. These new fish were averaging 2lb-3lb, so they became an obvious target.
The other fish present were thousands of tiny carp and carassio, which came into the venue when the gates to let the natural water source in were opened.
They went half-an-ounce to 6oz, but the water was literally crawling with them. It blew my mind how many fish there must be in their natural system.
The sheer numbers of these fish meant they couldn’t be ignored, so our practice days meant we had to conduct one plan for carp, and another for small fish.
Tackle and baiT
This was a great example of why I love team fishing. Had this been an individual competition, you would have only concentrated on carp, but these fish were hard to catch.
For the most part they had swum to the other side of the lake, so could you risk sitting for five hours for only one or two fish in a team match?
So after practice we had a plan. At 12m we would set up short soft rods for the 12m line, in my case 10ft Supera SLs. These were matched with small window feeders and braid mainline, so we could cast regularly and accurately to build a peg for
these small fish.
The main hookbait was single maggot but, as always for big weights of small fish, you didn’t need a small hook. Instead, a size 12 N40 proved the perfect tool.
For the carp line it was different. The rowing lanes
started at 30m, which meant you couldn’t cast any further, and as a result this set the limits for your furthest line.
Bait also had to be completely different for the bigger carp. The numbers of small fish meant that corn was the only viable bait to
feed or fish on the hook for them – any groundbait or smaller live baits just got destroyed by small fish straight away. This meant a very simple bait tray!
Tackle for this line had to be much more durable. Sinking Feeder Mono in 8lb was used as mainline, with 0.20mm Reflo Accu Power hooklength to size 14 N50 hooks. Because we didn’t need to cast far, 11ft Monster X rods fitted the bill perfectly.
Our apprOach
In practice we had worked out that these carp responded to heavy feeding. However, because there were not loads of fish, if you fed too heavily it meant you couldn’t catch them fast enough – plenty of liners, but no bites.
As a result, we decided to feed a single large baiting feeder of corn at 29m, then cast a smaller rocket cage feeder to 30m.
This meant, as the carp came to the large amount of corn, our hookbait would stand out on its own, just past the main feed, hopefully resulting in a quick bite.
These two techniques allowed us to adapt on the match days. So the plan was set!