EXPERIMENT WITH YOUR HOOKBAITS
JAKE WILDBORE reveals how tweaking your tactics mid-session can keep the bites coming
ALOT of my fishing down the years has been on well-stocked lakes like Linear Fisheries and Horseshoe, and I have learned so much from my time on these places.
Perhaps the one thing that stands out as being central to success on such venues is a willingness to work hard and to chop and change things until you find the winning tactic.
I love ‘spot’ fishing, by which I mean finding a good, clean area in a part of the lake where the fish have been showing, and then baiting it up.
Once such an area has been found, I always go in ‘softly’, introducing just a
“I always carry a pot of bright pop-ups, some fruity ones and a few fishy varieties”
dozen medium-sized Spombs of highly attractive feed items. This spring, I have been using a mixture of whole and halved Manilla boilies, along with sweetcorn and a good dose of Cloudy Manilla liquid to ramp up the attraction even further.
I am a huge fan of using pop-ups, especially at this time of year, but choosing which pop-up to thread on to your set-up can be tricky. Most anglers carry numerous tubs, most of which never see the light of day, but over the seasons I’ve managed to whittle it down to half a dozen. As well as a tub of mixed Manilla pop-ups in 12mm and 16mm sizes, I also like to carry pop-ups that ‘match the hatch’; in other words they are the same colour as the boilies I am feeding. On top of this I always carry a pot of really bright popups, some fruity ones and a few fishy varieties too.
The Signature Squid range of pop-ups are ideal, as each tub contains three different colours, and these have been my ‘go-to’ baits this year. As well as the great colour options, squid is an all-time classic hookbait flavour, with a phenomenal track record.
There are loads of theories regarding why bright pop-ups work so well but, above all, I think that a ‘stand-out’ bait will always be taken first by the carp. There’s loads of proof of this if you watch any of the ‘Underwater’ films. Time and again, the carp home in on the brightest pop-up on show.
I recently enjoyed a 24-hour session on Linear Fisheries’ Hardwick Lake and Smiths Pool, in Oxfordshire. With quite a few carp showing in the area I’d chosen to fish, I kicked things off by using pop-ups that matched my loosefeed but, to my surprise, after a couple of hours’ fishing I hadn’t had a bite. I knew a change was needed, so I switched to bright pop-ups on a couple of my rods and got a bite almost instantly! Quite often in spring the fish won’t be feeding aggressively, and in such circumstances the vividlycoloured pop-up acts like a beacon and is enough to entice any passing fish to