Leigh Maitland had another very good day on Fri 30th March in Lanesborough…

He set off early on Friday morning so he could be ready to fish at first light and hoped to hear a bit of surface activity from the larger fish in low light to see if they had moved in yet, as recent reports hadn’t been very positive.
He only heard maybe 3-4 fish topping which got him thinking, so he opted to fish the pole over the feeder as it gave him a few different bait presentation options to tempt the few wary fish that seemed to be there.  He chose to fish at 11m simply because its comfortable and Leigh knows from previous experience its easy to get the fish this close if you feed correctly.

He kept things very simple and set up only 2 rigs, one was a 4 g flat float for pinning the bait to the bottom set about 30 cm over depth and the other was a 1.5 g bubble for running through at a slightly slower pace than the current set slightly off bottom, each of these was set up on 0.16 mm Browning Hybrid Mono main line and 0.14 mm Browning Cenex line for hook length, both rigs had size 14 hooks to start off with and later upped to a 12 (serie18).

Bait for the day consisted of, 4 pints of Hemp, 2 pints of Maggots, 1 pint of Pinkies, 1 tin of Sweetcorn and approximately 7 kg of ground bait ( 50% Brown Crumb, 25% VDE Gold Pro 25% VDE Secret).  Leigh normally would have a few pints of casters in the mix but due to the great weather he had sold out.

Good catch at Lanesborough
Good catch at Lanesborough

Once ready he made only 5 Orange sized hard balls of ground bait laced with a handful each of Pinkie and Hemp, he cupped these in at 11m as he was still a little on the cautious side due to the little activity mentioned earlier, after 5 run throughs and 4 Roach to 6oz,  Leigh felt he could start to up the feed a little so for every second fish he introduced a golf ball sized nugget of ground bait, this then started to produce roach to 1 lb 8 oz with an average fish of 8-10 oz every run through, after a few hours he started to lose some very big fish so switched to the flat float with sweetcorn as a hook bait, straight away he bagged my first Tench of about 3 lb 8 oz followed by some decent bream to 3 lbs. when this method slowed down Leigh just switch back, get some feed in, attracting the roach then the bigger fish would follow.

It is very easy to go to Lanesborough and fish a feeder for the bigger fish but for a busy day and to test your self try the pole, big fish in running water and a light elastic is great fun !!

Lanesborough
Lanesborough

Leigh Maitland (Browning)

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