Cast more often
Over the last 12 months I’ve spent a lot of time feeder fishing at Bough Beech Reservoir in Kent.
Bough Beech is a big, deep venue and I feel it’s the depth as opposed to the size that makes fish hard to catch in some areas.
Take the dam, for instance. On some pegs I could get a count of 20 or more with a 1.5oz bomb when plumbing up!
The issue with water this deep is that fish don’t want to be on the bottom, which makes fishing the feeder very tricky to say the least!
It’s not that the fish aren’t there, they just tend to sit up off bottom where they feel more comfortable.
The secret to catching them is to drag them down by regular casting so they see the feeder falling through the water, creating a cloud they can follow down.
A big bed of bait just sitting on the bottom has no attraction in deep water as the fish can’t see it, so on the deep pegs I looked to cast every two minutes whether I was catching or not.
Bites then tended to come after 45 seconds to one minute, which seemed to back up my theory.