Jamie Hughes’ deep water tactics
Tweak your approach, says MAP man
ITHINK we’re all fairly comfortable with fishing relatively shallow commercials with up to 7ft of water.
We know the rigs we can get away with, and the feeds and how to introduce them to keep bites coming – as well as where in the peg we should fish.
However, pretty much all that goes out of the window if you’re on a deep commercial – and by ‘deep’ I mean more than 10ft at long pole range. There aren’t many of them about, admittedly, but should you have a match on one you’ll need to know how to change your approach if you don’t want to end up an also-ran.
Close to me is the magnificent Tri-Cast Weston Pools complex near Oswestry. One lake, the Clay Pit, is regularly used for opens but, as the name suggests, it’s deep, with over 18ft at 14.5m in some swims – you’d not even find that on most big rivers, let alone a commercial!
As a result, my rigs and feeding need a complete rethink to take on such depths. In summer, fishing shallow is brilliant but we’re not quite there yet. The carp aren’t coming off bottom for long enough, so my attack still revolves around catching them close to or on the deck.
BIG RIGS
The first thing to look at is tackle. While my hooks, lines and elastics aren’t that different from what I’d use in a shallow swim, my floats definitely are!
My float of choice for the Clay Pit is the MAP SD2, a classic rugby ball-shaped pattern in weights of 1.5g and 3g. You need that to get the bait straight down to the deck – waiting six or seven seconds for it to get to the bottom is time wasted, and using two sizes allows me to achieve a very different presentation of the hookbait.
The lighter float uses an olivette around 4ft away from the hook, then a few dropper shot spaced in between, while the 3g float has the bulk 18ins away – so it stands to reason that the lighter float will give the bait a slower fall in the bottom part of the swim than the heavier one. I’m banking on getting a bite from a carp as the bait drifts past its nose, so I’ll start on the light rig.
Mainlines are 0.15mm to a hooklink of 0.12mm (both Power Optex) with a size 18 Kamasan B911, and I use pink grade MAP TKS Twin Core hollow elastic.
TIGHTEN THE ELASTIC
Because of the depth of the swim, you could end up netting a carp on up to eight sections of pole if your elastic is too soft! Something a little bit stiffer is needed to not only set the hook in such a depth but also to let you land fish on a sensible length of pole. I’d go for around a couple of feet being out of the pole tip when it comes to netting time. It is also important to have a long landing net handle of around 4m, as the fish won’t pop up under your feet.
DISTANCE IS KEY
You may think that in such deep water it doesn’t matter where you fish, but that’s not the case. The water in the Clay Pit is naturally clear and I’d think that even on a deep, coloured lake the carp wouldn’t move to a shorter pole line until later in the day.
For that reason I’d fish between 14.5m and 16m – basically as far from the bank as I could, looking for the minimum depth at the maximum distance.
BALLS OF PELLETS
I find that anything other than pellets are a waste of time in deep water. Pellets sink quicker and can be fished as 6mm baits on a hair rig, safe in the knowledge that a small fish won’t rip it off the hook.
Dropping a pole cup full of pellets into 16ft of water means there’s no chance they’ll end up
in a tight spot on the bottom. To begin with I’ll dampen some 4mm pellets so that they just begin to go soft, then squeeze them into a ball of around 50 pellets. Feeding this way is just like using groundbait, only the pellets will break down to their natural state once on the deck.
The noise of feeding pellet balls will encourage carp to come off bottom and investigate. This is why I begin by feeding balls but once I know some carp are in the area, I switch to loosefeed. This keeps them on the bottom better and ensures some bait is always falling through the water.