I have just framed in a Wednesday open at Surrey’s Bury Hill Lakes using a hair-rigged Sonubaits S pellet and a Sonu groundbait combo. And here I want to share the secrets of my success here with our loyal blog readers.

I caught eight bream for a weight of 28lb and it was a bit of a frustrating match because the fish never had a chance to settle with a number of punts going through the swim.
I’m not making excuses when I say that, because the peg was only three feet deep and with it being the half-term, there was a lot more activity on the lake in any normal school term week!
On the match in question I drew the front bank, which as I said, is shallow. I set up a 12 ft Excel Feeder rod and used 5lb Direct Mono with the red, three-quarter ounce tip fitted to the rod.
My groundbait mix for the feeder was 70 per cent Sonubaits F1 groundbait and 30 per cent Sonubaits Supercrush Black.
I was fishing at a distance of 40 yards and the reason I used S Pellets as the hookbait was after a conversation with Dorking team-mate Steve Gardner. He has won a lot of matches at Bury Hill and he told me he won them using S Pellets.
I took a tip from him and used the 6mm size S pellets, with a mini band tied to a hair-rigged PR36 size 16, with the bank pulled into the pellet.
The first 90 minutes passed without any signs of activity but then I caught a couple of bream in a 20-minute spell.
The trouble was the number of punts that were going through my peg to access a pike fishing area. Every time a couple of punts went through, the fish vanished and it would take half-an-hour to coax them back for another feed.
I then caught four fish in a busy 20-minute spell but the boats reappeared and I caught nothing in the final 40 minutes.
I know that had there been fewer boats, I would have been able to settle the shoal and I would have caught a bigger weight. But that’s fishing for you! You win some, you lose some.