FEEDING AND FISHING

I KICKED off the swim with a ball of wetted-down micro pellets

– a lightly-squeezed nugget no bigger than a golf ball. It’s important that the pellets are only gently squeezed. This way the ball will start to break down as it falls through the water, ensuring the pellets spread out a little.

I then loosefed via a catapult with wetted-down 4mm pellets over the top, starting off with 6-10 every two minutes. Ideally, I would do this while fishing elsewhere, as if possible I always like to let my skimmer line settle for at least 30 minutes, or an hour if possible. The fish will be that bit more confident when you pick up the pole and have a look.

Today was actually really interesting, as things did not pan out as expected. There were a lot more skimmers about, but at 2oz to 4oz they were smaller than I hoped for, as a result of which I

spent a lot of time varying my feeding to try and find some better fish.

To start with I upped the feed to try and attract some bigger skimmers, but that didn’t work.

Even double pouching made no difference, as I still caught mainly a small stamp.

After that I tried to feed a good half-a-metre short of the float, the idea being to pull the smaller fish into the feed and pick the better ones off the back, where there was less competition.

This didn’t work either in terms of what I was looking to achieve! That said, both tactics were well worth trying and I lost nothing by doing so.

Even changing hookbaits, as in swapping from a soft to hard pellets, had no effect and the day just seemed like a case of taking what was there in the peg.

In the end I settled on feeding 25-30 pellets, catching a skimmer and then feeding the same again to catch the next fish.