Intro
Having seen the method feeder catch a few fish on Robin Red pellets, I decided to head to the tackle shop and get some 8mm pre-drilled Robin Red hard pellets and some “method ready” feed pellets. These have a shelf life of 6 months and are ready to be used directly in a method feeder without needing to be prepared/softened first.
I planned to have a few hours in the afternoon to see if the fish would respond during the usual match hours.
Lightening my load
I decided to take a much lighter load as follows: –
- 2 seat-box trays instead of 5; I also removed all of my heavy feeders from the deeper of my 2 trays and store my hook rig box in there instead. I also had to adjust the frame of my seat-box by raising the h-frame by about 90mm to account for the shallower set of drawers. This only takes seconds.
- Just 1 rod; my rod holdall usually has 4 rods and a pole and several banksticks etc. It is much lighter when taking a single feeder rod and much less metalwork.
- No bait bag; my Octbox bait bag is great when I need to take everything but is very heavy. Instead I loaded my Korum Transition back-pack with just what I needed.
- Fewer nets; I took just a landing net and left the 2 keepnets at home.
The end result was a seat-box that was very easy to push and a rod holdall that was so light that I could carry it over my shoulder. The pack-back was mounted to the seat-box in place of the bait bag.
It was also quick and easy to get set up and to pack up at the end.
A quiet start
I started fishing at about 2pm using the Robin Red hard pellets. I did not see any indications of fish until about and hour into the session. I then started to get little knocks suggesting that the feeder and the feed pellets were being attacked by the fish, However, they seemed to be ignoring my hook-bait because I didn’t get any proper bites.
Imperfect timing
My intention was to see if I could get a fish before 4pm as that is when the matches end. 4pm came and went went without any fish. I then decided to try sweetcorn on the hook and was rewarded with a Mirror Carp of around 6lb at about 4:15pm.
I then kept alternating between the Robin Red pellets and sweetcorn but got nothing on pellet. After about another hour a got the following lovely Common Carp that weighed 7lb 12oz. You can also see that I have resolved the camera focus issues that I was having previously,
I kept trying pellet but corn was the only thing that got me bites. I ended up with a Bream of about 2.5lb just before packing up.
Summary
I ended up with about 16lb but that all came in about 1 hour once they started biting. I still wasn’t sure whether the fish only started biting late in the day or after I had built up enough of a bed of feed. However I decided that I was probably unable to beat everyone in the match by fishing for silvers so would try a full day on the method feeder in the match and just hope they would show up.
Epilogue
I did fish the feeder all day in the match. Air pressure was high and weather was fine and clear so the fish would probably be up in the water but I had to give it a try. I got a few light twitches after about an hour so was quite hopeful. I then got a proper bite after about 2 hours but the fish swim toward me dislodging the feeder but didn’t hook itself. I did not get any further indications so the gamble did not pay off.
