With winter arriving and temperatures dipping with cold rain and chilly nights, it is time to rethink your feeding strategy and while Sonu Fin Perfect pellets play a vital part in this, less definitely becomes more with commercial water carp the target.

From November through to March, I would be looking to feed perhaps no more than half-a-pint of Fin Perfect pellets in a five-hour match when targeting fish on the straight lead. There are still quite a few 4mm or 6mm pellets in half-a-pint, and you need to be flicking in three or four pellets every three minutes or so.

The same applies with sweetcorn, although you can step it up a little but with corn and feed up to two tins in a five-hour match, because sweetcorn is 85 per cent water, so isn't all that filling.

What I see on commercial venues at this time of year is a lot of anglers fishing at 16 metres on the pole. Because the water loses a lot of colour, the fish tend to hang back a little further out and many anglers think fishing at full length will increase their chances of bites.
But carp are not stupid and so they back off beyond 16 metres as they soon learn that this represents a danger area.

To my mind it is better to fish at 20 to 22 metres out, and a bomb rig with a three-foot long taul can lead to good results.
To get the accuracy spot on I have come up with the idea of threading some 8lb reel line through the slots in my catapult and round the back of the cup. This means you can only pull the pouch back a small amount, which also means pellets or corn can only be fired a finite distance. Have a mess about and experiment until you get it right and a little tip like this is worth extra fish in the net.

The almost constant drip of pellets or corn falling down through the water is a means of drawing fish which may be swimming through the peg down to the bottom. A lassoed or hair-rigged pellet presented on a three-foot-long tail also works in deadly style because even after the bomb hits the bottom, the pellet still has three feet to travel before resting on the deck. Quite often a carp will intercept the pellet at this point.

The bomb needs to be small, too, and I often use one as small as an eighth of an ounce and I can only just cast it the distance required.
If I feed 6mm Fin Perfect pellets I tend to use an 8mm pellet on the hook, so that it just stands out that little bit.

Try these tips this winter and you will have some success. Be prepared to persevere until the afternoon because I firmly believe, from experience, that this method tends to work later in the day.
 
Whether that is because the water temperature has reached its maximum, or whether it is the gradual decrease in light values that triggers the fish, I don't honestly know, but I do know that from 1 o'clock until dusk, you have a better chance of catching a carp than earlier in the day.