The Coach
Andy May on the importance of mapping your swim
IT’S difficult to pin down the single most important thing to ensure a successful day’s sport, but plumbing up accurately is certainly a candidate.
Fail to work out the depth of your swim and you could be presenting your hookbait in the wrong area of a swim that is teeming with fish.
Fish O’Mania champ Andy May follows a few rules to help him work out the depth of his swim, and this week he reveals them exclusively in Angling Times...
TAKE YOUR TIME
“It’s extremely important that you know the exact depth of various areas of your swim, so I always take plenty of time plumbing up.
“A lot of people plumb up one line at the distance they are fishing and automatically assume that the areas to the left and right of that at the same distance are of the same depth. Not necessarily!
“On a lot of commercials the depths vary a lot. The left of your swim at 13m may be 4ft deep while to the right it could be 5ft.
“Using the same rig for both swims would mean you were fishing well overdepth when fishing to the right, and that would lead to you not seeing the bites when fish took the bait.
“Scour from left to right when using the plummet, checking the depth of the swim every couple of feet, looking for slight changes.”
WHAT IS DEAD DEPTH?
“Top anglers often talk about fishing at dead depth. This is when your hookbait just touches the bottom when the rig is in place.
“If the plummet hits the bottom and only the slice of the float tip that you will be watching when fishing is visible, then you have found dead depth.
“If the float sinks below the surface, you would be fishing off the bottom, and if more of the float is showing, you are fishing overdepth.
“As a rule of thumb, I like to plumb up so that just a fraction of the body is showing.
“This means I am about an inch overdepth. This will keep the hookbait on the bottom at all times – even if a gust of wind briefly affects my balance.”
KEY AREAS
“Although you need to scour every inch of your peg for depth changes, there are certain areas of your swim where the depth will definitely change quite drastically.
“If you are fishing in the margins or tight to an island you could have as little as a foot of water tight into the reeds, but come just a metre out and it could be more than double that.
“The same applies around 5m out. Most commercials slope down, and this is usually where the slope flattens off and the depths start to even out.
PLUMMET CHOICE
“I always use a fairly heavy plummet, as this helps me work out what is on the bottom. Some fisheries have gravel on the deck, others have silt.
“Lower the plummet in at a decent pace and if you feel it bounce you are fishing over a hard bottom –if it sticks, it has probably sunk into silt.
“If you are fishing over silt, plumb up every hour or so because the depth can change by a few inches as the fish tear up the lakebed as they feed.”
“Dead depth is when your hookbait just touches bottom with the rig in place”