With the river fining down nicely after the rain I fancied my chances of some good barbel and chub action on the float.

A method I have seen used to devastating effect on the river is the pellet waggler. With the large amount of pellet the fish see nowadays they simply can’t resist a shower of pellet falling through the water infront of them.
As well as the method being more selective for larger fish, it comes into its own on pegs where you have to fish further out. If you are fishing a waggler at say 35 yards, it is just impossible to feed maggots or casters, where as pellet can be fed much further and still maintain accuracy.
My peg is a nice even paced glide with 7 feet of water down the middle and this is where I would fish.
Tackle consisted of a 13ft power float rod and a pxr 3000 loaded with 0.19 powerline mainline to a 0.17 hooklength. My rig was a 3.5 gram loaded waggler with 5 evenly spaced no.8 droppers to a strong size 14 super spade hook. A 6mm-sonu halibut pellet is simply attached with a small bait band.

Chub will often take the pellet on the drop so I like to vary the way which the bait falls through the water. To do this I will have three tubs of feed, pellet soaked for three minutes, some for a minute and some dry. This tends to fool the sometimes-wary chub and keep them feeding more confidently.

It can be very easy to overfeed with pellet so I start by feeding between 4 and 8 pellets every run through and see how the fish respond.
It took an hour before I got my first bite, which resulted in a good chub of about 4lb.
By constantly altering the amount of feed I kept bites coming steadily for the rest of the afternoon. It is also very important to feed first and then cast, as the chub will very often take the pellet on the drop. Bites on the drop can be quite fast and ferocious so make sure your clutch is set correctly!

Unfortunately the barbel were not playing today but I managed to hook 13 good chub- landing 9 of them with the best just shy of 5lb. A great afternoons fishing and with less than 2 pints of pellets.