6/2/2012
The use of high-quality groundbaits to attract fish into your swim and stimulate their feeding urges is a successful tactic on many, well-stocked stillwaters. With plenty of competition for food, fish will investigate anything that suggests a square meal might be in the offing.
On many non-commercial venues, however, where natural food items may be quite abundant, it is often necessary to introduce some actual food as well to keep fish in the area. Most anglers merely use free samples of the hookbait, a perfectly logical choice, although there are some well-known, classic combinations of baits – mixed coloured maggots or hemp and sweetcorn, for example.
Most coarse fish have catholic diets and will, naturally, eat a wide range of food items. There is huge scope to exploit this, and the mixed buffet approach offers several advantages. Baits in a variety of colour ensures that some will be immediately noticeable whereas fish will have to work harder to pick out others; baits with a range of flavours and tastes will provide fish with more choices; an array of bait shapes will reduce the chances that the free offerings will all sink into weed or silt; and the different weights of the foods in the buffet will mean that fish will have to vary their rate of suction when picking them up. The additional weight of the hook and the resistance caused by the hook length will therefore be less noticeable than would be the case if the freebies and hookbait were the same.
There is huge scope for experimentation here, the only limits being your imagination and your confidence to try something novel. Simple starter options include: pellets of mixed sizes and types; home-made or proprietary particle mixes, such as pigeon conditioning food (‘Partiblend’) or similar; and a mixture of different sized, coloured and flavoured boilies. Don’t forget, too, that there is no reason why you shouldn’t include a mix of textures – hard, soft, rubbery and crunchy.
Most of these mixed buffet free baits can be enhanced with natural food additives. A splash of any of the Marukyu Special Formula Additives (SFAs) and/or a dusting with krill or Sanagi powder will increase their potency and pulling power. |
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9.1.2012
The next month or so usually coincides with the coldest period of the year, and fishing can be more a test of endurance than skill. But unless you’re fishing in matches or have just one, pre-determined day at your disposal each week, watching the weather can bring big dividends.
Periods of low pressure in winter tend to be associated with warmer air temperatures. It may be windy or wet (or both), but the temperature rises can trigger torpid fish to at least snack for a while. They may not move far from the places where they feel comfortable, and on stillwaters deeper areas, banks that face the wind, inflows and areas of cover are all likely holding areas.
It pays to move - several times perhaps - if bites are not forthcoming. You are aiming to drop onto fish because they are unlikely to be swimming far in search of food. The usual advice is valid – keep baits small and visible, with a minimum of loose feed. Winter groundbaits that attract but don’t feed fish are a great help.
Any visual indication of fish present should noted. Roach, for example, will sometimes ‘head-and-shoulder’ gently at the surface, and feeding pike will often produce swirls. You should make a point of presenting a bait when and where such tell-tale signs occur.
In high pressure conditions – typified by sunny days and cold (or freezing) after-dark temperatures - the warmth of the sun may also stimulate fish to rise in the water. Look for areas that are open to the sun, not those shrouded in shadow. The water in many stillwaters will be very clear in winter now that any suspended algae has died, and finer lines, smaller hooks and more subtle rigs are the order of the day.
It follows that suspended or popped-up baits stand a good chance of being taken if they are directly in front of fish. Aside from pop-up boilies, most baits can be made to rise in the water by adding bits of cork or foam. The amount to use should be determined by testing the baited rig in the lake margins (or in a bucket of water). Brightly-coloured and flavoured baits also stand out and help fish home in on your hookbait.
Fishing partially iced-over lakes can be particularly slow and non-productive… with one notable exception – pike. The day a lake begins to ice over and, especially, the day a prolonged period of ice melts can provide incredible pike fishing … as long as you’re in the right spot! |
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On a typical, man-made coarse fishing lake, the central island is the most obvious feature. If it’s within casting distance, it’s a fair bet that many or most anglers will try fishing in the island margins. Fish will frequent these areas, of course, especially if groundbait or loose feed is often on the bed, but they can become very wary of such features, too.
There is an even more prominent feature that is largely ignored – the near-bank margin. The shallower edges of a lake can be highly productive and crammed with natural food, especially if the margins are lined with reeds and rushes which provide invertebrates with food and cover. Water-lilies, overhanging trees and bushes, and tree roots, also denote food larders.
Margin fishing requires a bit of thought and some common sense. Careful plumbing before you fish should tell you the location of any ledges, the bases of which are often the hotspots. Unless you can sit well back from the edge, it’s best to fish along the margins, to the left or the right, to avoid spooking fish, but – obviously – noise should be kept to a minimum. There no reason why a little bait cannot be introduced into the left and the right-hand margins so that you can alternate where to cast until bites are forthcoming. Your presentation can be quite delicate because long casting won’t be required, although fishing antenna, waggler or other end-only floats and sinking the line will help prevent any drag drawing the bait out of position.
At such close quarters, it is not unusual for there to be give-away signs of fish, be they slow rolling, swirling, bubbling, clouding of the water or knocking of the lilies, reeds or trailing branches. Under your nose fishing can be exciting stuff!
Top Tip
One useful ruse that is very rarely practiced nowadays is to give the margins in your chosen spot a good ‘stir’ to disturb the bed and expose bottom-living invertebrates. A long-handled rake or a weed knife screwed into an extendible landing net handle will do the job. It can be surprisingly effective for most species. |
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THE huge expansion in carp fishing in the last two decades is probably responsible for the widespread use of hard baits. Prior to that – and certainly before the evolution of the hair rig – most of the baits used by anglers were quite soft. Even seed baits such as hemp or wheat were cooked or stewed first, rendering them crunchy or chewy.
The advent of boilies originated in the need to ensure that baits intended for carp were not first whittled away by smaller fish. This makes it impossible for a carp to crush the boilie in its mouth, encouraging fish to suck the offering to their throat teeth, and the self-hooking rigs did the rest.
So do soft baits have a place in angling given that most coarse fish possess pharyngeal teeth quite capable of crushing hard food items? The emphatic answer is: yes! They offer several key features soft texture which allows them to be ‘mouthed’ by fish; high leak-out of flavours and attractants; and, in many cases, the ability to be molded different shapes and sizes.
Match anglers are adept at using pastes, soft pellets and other softees as aids to catching fish. Such baits are particularly good during the cooler months, when fish require far less food and can afford to be more ‘picky’ than during the summer months. And, of course, soft baits fished with a pole are unlikely to fly off the hook as casting is not required.
This lesson is one that big-fish anglers would be advised to recognise, providing baits can withstand casting. Thankfully, the Marukyu range includes several types of soft pellets that posses just these properties. They can be mounted on a hook, squeezed onto hair rigs (around a small, fixed hair stop, for example), wrapped around boilies or fished with other hookbaits, cocktail fashion.
Top Tip
Krill powder and liquid krill are very adaptable products that offer brilliant powers of fish attraction. A soft hookbait bait tossed into the magic powder or liquid before casting will emit a puff of attractants when it hits the water. |
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We anglers have a peculiar appreciation of bait colour. On the one hand, many anglers will buy maggots of mixed colours and ring the colour changes to keep catching fish; conversely, very few people use sweetcorn in anything but its natural yellow colour, and I’ve never encountered anyone who has attempted to colour bread flake!
Although fish eyes have form and function similar to humans’, there are significant differences. Being located on each side of their head, with wide fields of vision, fish eyes give them telescopic vision some distance in front of their heads. However, they also have a ‘blind spot’ in front of their mouths, effectively meaning that they don’t see their food just before they eat it.
Fish can differentiate one colour from another, albeit that this ability is less pronounced than our vision… a bit like watching a television with the colour control toned down. But it seems that they are able to see colours at the ends of the spectrum that are invisible to humans – at shorter (ultra-violet) and longer (infra-red) wavelengths. As light penetrates water, it is absorbed, with colours at the red end of the spectrum being absorbed first and blues last.
In clear and shallow water, changing bait colours makes sense, but in deeper and coloured water, many colours will appear black to fish. While it is certain that there is no single colour that is best for all fish in all circumstances, stand-out colours are often highly effective at catching the attention of passing or cruising fish… white, yellow and orange all seem to do this, probably because they contrast with the bed.
On the other hand, when fish become bait-shy, more muted coloured baits that almost blend in with the bed coloration may prevent fish being spooked by more visible offerings. There is huge room for experimentation with bait colours, using simple food dyes or powdered dye additives.
Top Tip
Fish eyes are good detectors of movement. Baits which sink slowly or are ‘twitched’ occasionally can produce instantaneous results, and neutrally-buoyant or pop-up baits are often highly attractive to fish because of their movement caused by the localised currents created when fish are in the vicinity. |
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