Where To Fish: Tunnel Barn Farm
When it comes to great winter sport, Warwickshire’s Tunnel Barn Farm is right up there with the best! We joined Mark Malin recently for some amazing cold water f1 sport.
Match fishing during the winter can be challenging to say the least, with many venues becoming peggy with lots of fish in areas but devoid of life in others being the harsh reality that all match anglers experience.
That said, if you choose your venues carefully some amazing fishing can be had, even in the harshest of conditions.
Tunnel Barn Farm in Warwickshire has become synonymous with excellent winter fishing, with one of the biggest winter leagues in the country running each year. Attracting some of the very best anglers the UK has to offer, winning at Tunnel is no easy task but with the right approach in the cold, you are guaranteed some great fishing whether you draw well or not.
One angler who makes the venue his home from November through until March is MAP’s Mark Malin, a regular name in the frame and has enjoyed team success in the popular teams of four on many occasions.
With Tunnel being a difficult venue to find consistency on, we decided to catch up with Mark to find out a bit more about fishing at Tunnel in the winter months and the tactics and tips you need to employ to be successful at this fish filled winter wonderland.
The Correct Depth!
Lots has been written about Tunnel Barn Farm and f1 fishing in general over the years and one of the most common things you’ll hear the best anglers talking about is the depth they’re fishing in.
This is possibly one of the single most important things to get right, especially when it’s cold, fish in too shallow water and you probably won’t get many bites, fish too deep and you could be missing out on a lot of bites elsewhere!
The whole point of this is that there will always be a depth where the fish feel most comfortable feeding, this has many factors including thermoclines and water clarity but get it right, and you’re already halfway there.
Unfortunately, there is no golden rule which is set in stone, so caution needs to be taken but a great starting point for any session when fishing to far banks or islands is to plumb some rigs up in three and four feet of water, these offer a happy medium in terms of depth and if one doesn’t work, the other often will.
Of course, another bonus of f1 fishing at this time of year is that there isn’t any need to prime lines too much, other than a short line which can be loose fed for later in the match.
Switching depth can quite simply be a case of replumbing or picking up another rig, feeding a few maggots or pellets through a pole pot and fishing it straight away, if you’re on enough fish, bites are likely to follow soon after.
For margin work, the same rule applies, around 3ft of water is perfect for getting yourself a late run of quality fish and is an area of your peg that shouldn’t be ignored at any time of the year.
The deepest areas of your peg can also be productive, usually areas I tend to target on a short pole line or in open water if I have space, the deeper water can be brilliant when the water is at its coldest, and later in the match when the fish will actively drop down to feed with more aggression.
So, if you’re going to prime a line anywhere, do it in some deep water and hope for a late arrival of the big old f1s that average well over 2lb in most of the lakes.
I’m going to spend quite a bit of time fishing in the maximum 5ft of water for the first few hours of my session today as I have plenty of open water to explore and I expect to catch quite a few fish by rotating lines before moving across.
Rigs & Bait
There’s no need to complicate anything when it comes to bait and tackle at Tunnel Barn Farm, generally you are going to need three baits, pellets, maggots and a bit of expander groundbait– that is it!
I’ve set up three rigs, two for the deeper water, and one across. The rigs for fishing in the deeper water are a pellet rig which features a 0.4g MAP F1 wire float with a strung bulk.
maggot rig which includes a 0.3g MAP F1 carbon float with a bulk and one dropper, some might think a strung rig is better, but at this time of the year, I expect to catch best on the bottom, so I want to get the rig down to catch quicker when the fish arrive short.
The same maggot rig is also replicated on the far bank in 3ft of water, all my rigs are set up on 0.15mm Optimum Power to 0.11 hook lengths, size 18 hooks cover all and while the fishing is still good with decent weights needed to win, an 8-10 TKS Solid Core Hybrid elastic is perfect, once it goes colder a 6-8 would be my go to.
The Session
To kick off, I plan on fishing a 5 metre line in the deep water with pellets, simply potting around 20 micros in each put in with an expander on the hook, this should give me some sort of idea what kind of day it’s going to be and how we expect the fish to feed.
Starting off, I waited a few minutes, but I was soon getting indications, and it wasn’t too long before I was catching the first of a run of stockies on pellets. Stockies are great for bites early in the match, but if you can, you really need to find those bigger f1s that are the real game changers.
After a bit of a flurry of action at 5 metres, I popped the plummet on and went out to 9 metres, and started again, just potting a few micros and going straight over it with an expander.
Here I found a few better fish, along with a few stockies again, with the water going clearer, it seemed the fish were happier a bit further away from the bank today as the run of bites I had here definitely lasted longer than it did a couple of sections closer.
My next move was again, to add a couple of sections, out to 13 metres of my TKS G-Series G60 this time, and just go through the motions of making the most of a good run, if you can make these last long enough on each line you can end up with the perfectly timed match to go across and then make the most of a good run short to finish.
The 13 metre line provided me with bites once again, lifting and dropping the rig was key to enticing a bite, as was using a backshot to keep the rig still once it was lowered in, there wasn’t much wind but even a small amount of surface skim can contribute to the detriment of your presentation so I never fish without backshot.
I felt I’d exhausted my open water lines over the two and a half hours that I’d fished them, and with 35lb in the net, it’d been productive but with a few liners and foul hooked fish when I fed my pellets towards the end of my time at 13 metres, it suggested the fish probably wanted to move into shallow water now, and it’s those signs you must look out for.
Feeding across, I opted for a mix of micros and expander groundbait through a medium flexi pot, starting with a 4mm expander on the hook, but with the groundbait I was feeding, I had the option to swap this to maggots at any point.
The fishing across was brilliant, and I was catching steady, but you always need to think ahead, my next move would be to come short on maggots for the final hour to 45 minutes, so I started to feed this line by hand with a good pinch of maggots every 90 seconds or so.
I expected the stamp of fish to be bigger fishing across, and I wasn’t wrong catching fish approaching 4lb, lots of these High Pool f1s are big now, and if you can line them up, a big weight is possible even in the winter months.
With just a short while remaining before we called it a day, I wanted to drop in on the short line to see if we could catch a few on maggots… well the float barely settled before it bolted from sight! This was a prime example of how it can be during the autumn and winter, when the fish want to feed, it can be frantic, but you need to get your timing right.
The fish on the short line were of a great stamp, and the net of fish you can see in the catch shot for this feature, were all caught short on maggots in the last 50 minutes of the session, amazing fishing! With around 90lb caught in just four hours, it had been a brilliant day, and we decided to call it a day.
Tunnel Barn Farm is a true thinking anglers’ venue, and you’ll always come away from a match here thinking of how you could have caught a few more fish, because there is always a few more to be caught somewhere in your peg.
If you want to sharpen up on your f1 game, or just enjoy some amazing cold weather fishing, I cannot think of a better venue to visit.
