Brooksby College Carp Lake near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire has been the testing ground for many of my angling ideas - and on a visit there last week I tried out the new Sonubaits Paste pellets in Halibut and Bacon Grill flavours - and had great success, fishing them hair-rigged on the waggler, up in the water.

These new pellets, which are all 8mm, are really soft and versatile. They can be hooked on in the conventional way, pushing the hook point into the top of the barrel and rotating the hook. Alternatively a paste pellet can be flattened and wrapped around a small pellet on the hook. Thirdly, they can be hair-rigged, for use on the tip, the pole or the float.

What I like about them is the noise that they make when they go into the water. They make a proper ‘plop’ and this is what attracts carp into the peg.
On the day in question,  I had set up to fish on the bottom, but after an hour and just one fish hooked and lost, which I believe was foul-hooked, I figured out that the fish must be sitting higher in the water.

Brooksby is 12 feet deep and I decided to set up a waggler rod and try fishing in the top five feet of water. I threaded up my Preston Innovations Super Sentient 13’ float rod and attached a loaded waggler. The reel line was 4lb Direct Mono and I tied on a 0.15mm Preston Powerline hooklength, completed with a size 18 Preston PR36 hook. This is a great hook for hair-rigging because it has an out-turned eye, which makes penetration more effective as it results in a  more ‘in-line’ pull.

I started to catapult a few fin perfect 4mm pellets - between a dozen and 20 - out into the water, about 20 to 25 metres out, and bites were evident from the word go, with the float set at three-and-a-half feet.

It wasn’t a situation where you would put the rod down in a rest and wait for the tip to pull round, signalling a fish on. You had to strike at the bites when the float dipped under.

I ended up catching nine carp, averaging around 8lb apiece. Interestingly, there were nine other anglers on the lake and only one of them had a single carp all day. They were all persisting with bottom-fished baits and I realised that my success was down to coming up in the water to find the fish. Carp are like that. You’ve got to fish at the depth they want to swim at, whatever time of year it is.

But as for the paste pellets? Well, I was impressed. They keep their shape well, even after a  few minutes on the hook. They are pliable but angler-friendly, and the fish like them!

The result of the Paste Pellets