Pleasure Day Tunnel Barn Farm 23.04.2018

With nothing booked or planned for my shift off days, I accepted an invitation from Vic for a pleasure day at Tunnel Barn Farm. I have not been here for what seems like 10 years, back in the days of the Jinx series. He even offered to pick me up.
Leaving just after 6am and going across country, the journey did not take long and I managed my first ever look at Warwick Castle, what an impressive building that is.
We were soon pulling into the fishery and looking slightly puzzled as to where we needed to go to get tickets etc. Still a rather nice gentleman( later found out he was the owner) on a quad sorted us out and pointed us in the right direction. We purchased our day tickets and fishery pellets and were shown the lakes on a map. We decided to fish the High Pool pegs 2 and 3 due to the wind. Vic was on 2 myself 3. I must say at this point that the whole complex looked brilliant, well laid out, plenty of pegs with room, cut grass all round, no pot holes on the drives and most of the pegs you could park behind.
With no prior knowledge of High Pool I decided to fish at 2+1 working my way outwards as the fish backed off. I opted to fish shallow as all the videos I had seen dictated this, I set up three rigs covering anything from 2ft to 6inches. All were .2g Gandhi's tied to .15 NGuage to .13 off the same material. Hooks were size 18 B911 F1's . I also set up a deep rig for 2+1 line just in case the colder weather had put them down. Bait wise I had 2 bags of fishery 4mms for feeding, a selection of different 6mm Hookers and a pint of dead red maggots in case I really struggle.

Peg 3 High Pool

I started off by fishing 2+1 feeding 4 or 5 pellets every 20 seconds or so, I was fishing the deeper 2ft rig and after 5 minutes I started missing bites, so switched to the 1ft rig, slightly shorter in length and still keeping a short line between float and elastic.That seemed to work better and I started connecting with a few F1's, this went well for around an hour, feeding four or five pellets regularly and fishing the tight line, the elastic was coming out on its own as the fish hooked themselves. Vic had started at 11m and had a couple of roach before coming in a lot closer and fishing shallow saw him amongst the fish as well. The other two anglers on the lake were not catching.
After 90 minutes I reckoned started getting liners on the 1ft rig and switched again to a rig set at 8 inches. It was dotted right down to a dimple and every movement of the float was struck at. Still fish were coming, but I think this is where I started going wrong, I was now feeding 10 to 12 pellets every put in and I think the fish went back down again. I had to keep swapping rigs around to keep the fish coming.
At around the 3 hour mark we both stopped fishing and looked at the results of our labour. Both Vic and I had over 100lb in our nets. No wonder TBF has got such a good reputation.

Over 100lb of F1's for Me

A Happy Vic, Bagging over a ton

We decided to fish on longer, Vic deciding on either 50 fish or 1400hrs, whichever came sooner. It was strange for me, as I could not get the fish lined up. We had only stopped fishing for around 15 minutes and I needed to start again from scratch, whereas Vic was back in straight away. He was soon powering away from me and although I was nicking odd fish of a decent stamp, I could not keep up with his catch rate.
Another 90 minutes passed and Vic had had enough. The 50 mark had been reached. I had another 24 to add to my total.
We have averaged the fish at 1 1/2lb and know that the majority of fish were 2lb plus so were extremely happy with the way the day went, good company, good fishing,what more could anyone ask for?.