anglersmail.com 9 JULY | 47FISHERY
IN FOCUS
This week Ian Chapman visits
Old Hough Fishery,
Middlewich, Cheshire.
staple diet of carp across all
commercials.
I wanted Lewis to
demonstrate a perfect
summer pellet approach,
but we both knew that the
main species, carp, would be
feeding shallow, due to the
conditions.
Nevertheless, he started by
laying down a bed of pellets
with a pole pot, to try to make
the fish feed on the deck,
where they are, arguably,
more straightforward to catch.
He tried fishing on the
bottom for an hour or so, but
eventually had to succumb to
the reality that the fish were
intercepting the bait as soon
as it was entering the water.
He decided to swap over to a
shallow rig, and it didn’t take
long before he was catching
lots of fish, some from just a
few inches deep.
The excitement clearly
comes from outwitting and
hooking very fit carp, and then
battling them on 6-8 elastic to
0.14 mm lines. Great fun!
The engrossing aspect is
watching how Lewis adjusts
his feeding strategy all of
the time, to try to cajole the
carp into taking the bait, and
then refining his rig so that he
hooks a fish on the majority of
put-ins.Keep it simple
Lewis's rigs are very simple.
He uses a slimline, bodied
float for the deeper swim,
shotted with evenly spaced
No.10s, to fish mid-depth, in
around 3 ft of water.
Banded pellets is the key to
hooking fish successfully, but
you will miss bites when there
are a lot of hungry carp in your
swim, and you're bound to get
line bites and occasional
foul-hooked fish.
Lewis uses a Drennan
Crystal Dibber for the
shallower swim, shotted with
a small bulk just above a 4 in.
hook length. The shot create
a tiny bolt rig, in that the carp
tend to hook themselves when
they take the bait.
In the deeper swim, Lewis
prefers to keep his feedingtight, using a pole pot to
deposit loose pellets over his
float.
When fishing the shallow
swim, Lewis ‘pings’ out bait
with a catapult, to try to
create a lot of competition
between the carp.
As the session progressed,Lewis started catching
consistently, and it was a
joy to observe him in action.
It’s not a fluke that highly
experienced match anglers
such as Lewis catch more
than the rest of us, far from it,
as what sets them apart is the
Continued over››Lewis Breeze loves getting his elastic
stretched by Old Hough carp.
It was a joy to watch a
master at work.