Saturday 4th February - Lower park farm

I haven't fished this venue for over 2 years but really liked it when I was last there. As I remembered from last time all the lakes had a lot of stock fish in so I had already planned my approach.

36 anglers fishing.

I drew peg 11 on Lowland which meant nothing to me. Getting to my peg and not seeing any movement at all (no fish blowing/topping on the whole lake) I thought it could be really hard!

I decided to attack it like so:

13m to my right. With maggots and micro pellets. The rig was a F1 maggot chianti float in 4x14. 0.13 f1 spider mainline to an 0.09 stream hooklength, to a size 20 Colmic WN501 hook.

13m to my left. Where id feed 4mm pellets and fish an expander or hard pellet. The rig was a Colmic big float. In 0.5g. 0.13 mainline again to a 0.09 stream hooklength, to a size 16 WN501.

Top 6 straight in front. Exaclty the same rig as above just a slightly lighter float in 0.3g.

An edge line to the next pallet in 3ft of water. The rig was a Colmic Mike float, 0.152 F1 spider mainline to an 0.12 stream hooklength.

I kicked off on the maggot line to weigh it up and see how it was going to fish. An few moments passed and my float dinked and 3ft of Colmic 1.5mm hollow soon fired out, this resulted in a small angry, plump F1 which was just the start I needed. Before I knew it, another 9 f1s soon followed and I was flying.

After these 10 fish this line was starting to fade, so a quick look on my pellet line a was soon back catching again. Pellets seemed to be much better so decided to change my other line to a pellet line so they were both the same and got in a nice rythmn of catching 5 or 10 fish then changing lines. I caught best by hooking a fish and then rattling in 10 4mm pellets ready for the next fish.

I found the 1.5mm hollow elastic was best as I didn’t need to use the puller bung which would of slowed me down. The bites were really negative, tiny little indications on the float or just the float simply doing something unnatural.

With about an hour to go I had 65 fish on the clicker, I couldn’t catch short for some reason and I had been feeding a little bit of bait down the edge. Time for a look! I caught 2 f1s straight away down here, same size as I was catching in open water. The next fish was a little carp and then not a bite so for the last 40 minutes I decided to stay on my open water lines.

The hooter sounded and the match was over, a look down at my clicker and 78 was displayed! It really didn’t feel like I had caught that many… but I had!

The scales came round and my 75 small f1s and 3 carp weighed 62-8-0. Which to my surprise won the match!


I had a really enjoyable day catching those stockies and that’s the most stockies i've ever caught so also learnt loads of things!