Following my paste post I returned to Crookwood one further time on Wednesday 26th and fished peg 18. For some unknown reason I didn’t take a picture of the peg! Anyway think of it like peg 23 with lily pads on both sides! I decided to fish both far corners of the pads with the same tackle as previously but would introduce groundbait on the right with no pellet and pellet on the left with no groundbait and have two put ins before swapping to the other side, hence rotating the swims throughout the session.

Paste was also changed to a 50-50 mix of the blue packet and No5#(white pack) that filled a large pole pot, to this I added 1.5 pots of water, gave it a quick swirl so the paste was all saturated and then left it while I tackled up. To this I then added a liberal dose of “octopus” powder which is in fact jellyfish powder and kneaded to form a ball of paste that would last the session (10am to 1pm). A big pot of paste does last me about 3 hours.

I kick started the session with a pot of F1 groundbait to the right edge and a half pot of 4mm pellet to the left. Starting over the groundbait the swim started to fizz with the float dancing around before a skimmer produced a positive lift on the bulk and was duly netted. When I went on to the pellet swim it was a lot quieter and it took till about the third rotation to get a bite. Overall the bites came quicker over groundbait but the fish were a smaller stamp. I managed to extract a tench of 2-02 and a bream of 3-02 plus a carp of about 2lb from the left swim while just the one small carp from the groundbait swim. I also had 10 skimmers (roughly 3-7 split) and 2 roach (0-2) for a 16-08 weighed total.

On the face of it the groundbait seems to attract more but smaller fish while the pellet only approach seemed to attract the better quality. The paste change was also interesting as I have now tried three different mixes with the Red No3~ and ~2 mix producing mainly small fish compared to the other mixes. I will continue experimenting and intend to try through the winter with paste also!