For a while now I have been discussing shallow water paste floats with Neil Powell aka Hillbilly and as over the past few weeks he has sent me an assortment of proto types to try, I thought I'd better get out on the bank and try them out. The ideal place to test them out is my local Leatherhead DAS club pond about 100 yards from my house so having finished at the Wildlife Centre and grabbed some lunch I was on the bank by 2pm ready for a few hours fishing.I set up the first of the new floats a "Body Up" float taking 2 number 8 shot to shot it to the top of the body and by fishing it dead depth the paste would shot it the rest of the way down. The rest of the rig was 0.18 line to a size 14 B911 attached to some yellow elastic (which I've forgotten what it is) in my H10 pole. The only bait I had taken to test the paste floats was naturally Paste !
After 20 minutes or so, the float was looking wonderful but still hadn't gone under ! Although I wasn't that worried as it often takes a while to start catching at the pond but once you start it usually continues. At 2.35 I had my first fish, a carp of about 3lb then had another 10 fish in the next 45 minutes before deciding to swith floats to the "Body Down" float which I preferred the look of but Neil says wont work properly !
I actually started to catch more fish with the other float but it could have just been that more fish had now come into the peg. I'd been catching fish between 2lb and 4lb on small pieces of paste when I switched to big bits that only just fitted in my paste cup, the bites slowed a bit but the fish size increased to 5-6lb. By this time my fish catching exploits had come to the attention of three local lads who were chucking their leads three quarters of the way across the lake and couldn't understand why I was catching in the edge by the rushes !
Even when they were standing up next to me just yards away from my float I continued to catch and one of them (who turns out to be a boy who lives opposite me) decided to be my personal gilly and net all my fish for me, including a suprise goldfish of about 2lb !
I finished my session at 5.30 with carp number 32, gave my remaining paste to three very grateful youngsters and took the short walk home. As a test session it was useful to know that the floats performed well and are certainly very strong but the conditions today were almost perfect so it will be good to try them again in less favourable conditions. You never know, the Hillbilly "Pikey Shallow Water Paste" float could soon be on sale and available to all !
