Deep and sensitive, not normally the first two words that pop in your head when you think of Mark Pollard but if you’re into your pellet waggler fishing they’re two words Polly thinks you should be thinking about. We joined him at Peterborough’s Float Fish Farm to get to know his sensitive side.

The pellet waggler can be a brilliant method and on a lot of days the fish are really aggressive and will feed confidently. What I’ve found in recent years though is as the fish get pressurised these red-letter days are getting fewer and fewer.

If you think about shallow fishing on the pole, over the years this method has been refined to enable us to hit more bites. Short lines above the float, sensitive bristled floats and even self hooking jiggers have all become the norm to help increase the bite to fish ratio. Yet on the waggler we fish thick 8mm or 10mm floats and expect the fish to still take the bait with the aggression of a piranha. This isn’t the case and by applying a sensitive approach to your pellet waggler fishing you can put more fish in the net.

A sensitive approach doesn’t have to mean small fish