‘HAND-TO-MOUTH’ IN THE MARGINS
Wychwood’s Rick Hurley loves fishing right in the edge, especially if he can place his bait and loose feed by hand. Here’s how he goes about it...
IN ALL forms of angling, if you don’t have confidence in your tactical approach, you won’t fish as effectively – it’s as simple as that.
This is one of the big advantages of my preferred method of fishing the margins. Wherever possible, I like to place my rig by hand, and whenever I do so, the confidence I have in the effectiveness of my presentation soars.
Even the best rigs in the world, used by the best anglers, can tangle on the cast, so for me there is nothing better than hand-placing a rig, and ensuring with my own eyes that it is fishing 100 per cent effectively on the bottom.
It’s those little ‘one percents’ that really count when angling for big, elusive carp. Patterns of behaviour Placing rigs by hand in the extremities of a lake not only gives you the opportunity to see the fish up close, it also allows you to be selective if you’re targeting a particular big fish by watching it feed and how it goes about moving in and out of an area, giving away its preferred patrol routes.
It may like to sit under a favourite bush, or to hide away in a particular snag. The approach means you can monitor your spots to see if they’re being fed over or remain untouched.
If you’re safely up a tree watching from above, the view can be even better - and by ‘safely’ I mean keeping three points of contact at all times!
On weedy lakes the margins are more often than not a much safer bet for achieving perfect presentation of your bait. A lot of the time when we fish three rods at range out in the lake, especially at this time of year, strands of weed can play havoc with the lie of your line between you and the rig, and that’s before you start to worry about the twigs and other detritus on the bottom. Beating the birds Of course, the make-up of the bottom, the stock of fish present and the shape of the lake all come into play when margin fishing, and the resident birdlife needs monitoring too.
Too many swans can make life difficult for margin angling, especially if the spot is less than 6ft deep. Even using dull-coloured baits can be futile, as they’ll spot you putting a handful in from 400 yards away! It can be the same with coots – once one has found some bait on the bottom and fed upon it, it’s as if they have GPS and will return to the spot repeatedly. Even if they don’t see anything they’ll dive to check, so you need to be selective with the time and location of fishing in this way.
There are a few little tricks you can employ to lessen the problems if you have a spot you really fancy but you’ve been spotted by the feathered pirates.
The first is to break your baits into small pieces, making it much more difficult to for them to pick up. They can become frustrated and will often move on in search of an easier meal.
Another tip is to fish directly under a bush or overhanging snag. Coots won’t dive unless they can get directly above a bait, so it’s a sneaky way of keeping them off your primed spot.
At one of the venues I fish, Frimley, often I will cast over a small bay in one particular swim with just a bare lead on the end, and then walk round to collect it from the reeds. With my baited rig in hand, and a bucket with the exact amount of free offerings I want to put in, I’ll then wade the lead out to the spot, clip my baited rig on, lower it in front of me and watch it to the bottom.
I can adjust the lead position to the exact location within the spot I want, and straighten the rig out. Fishing in this way also allows you to use really supple braids without fear of tangling. Easy on the freebies It’s best to bait up around your rig after positioning it, rather than the other
way round. This means you can scatter the bait on the far side of the lead and leader, so that any browsing carp won’t be feeding directly over your line, where they might spook and ruin all your hard work.
As I mentioned earlier, I limit the amount of free offerings I carry out to the spot in my bait bucket, and that’s because it’s all too easy to get carried away once you’re out there and overdo it, lessening your chances in the process.
I use a mix of pellets and broken boilies most of the time, and because it’s ‘in the edge’ stuff you don’t need to worry too much about bream ruining your rigs. What’s more, if there are bream present in the lake, the carp won’t be used to seeing pellets too much, due to other anglers fishing out in the lake not using them because they don’t want to attract the bream.
The result is that this simple, staple bait can be a real advantage, if you can get away with using them.
When it comes to choosing a hookbait, it all depends on how pressured the lake is.
On some lakes a bright yellow pop-up lowered on to a marginal spot might produce the goods, but on more heavily-pressured lakes, a whittleddown bottom bait, hand-placed on to a clear spot in the margins, can be the perfect offering.
Over the years I’ve discovered that often the bigger fish will feed more cautiously around the edge of patches of bait, but placing your rig and loosefeed by hand allows you to counter this behaviour and capitalise on it by dropping your rig on the extremities of the freebies. Edges in the edge When it comes to end tackle, there’s no need to get too carried away. A sharp hook and a heavy lead are my two main prerequisites.
A 4oz flat pear lead is my favourite pattern, and gives great hookholds. Again, because I’m not casting out, I can lower this down gently on to the spot with the minimum of fuss or disturbance.
The limits to what you do when edge fishing are endless. On one venue I used to fish, Sheepwalk, I had a small productive shingle spot rocking in the margins, so I grabbed a few handfuls of the substrate and coated my lead in the shards using glue.
When that lead touched the bottom in the gin-clear water it blended in effortlessly - only the hooklink and leader material allowed you to spot the bait’s location, and even then only just!
It’s little edges like this that can help you to catch the biggest, wariest carp that would have otherwise not have graced your net. Such fish seem to have a heightened instinct to avoid capture, so watching the whole thing play out in the margin can help you to change your set-up and reposition it every time the fish moves out of the area.
Placing your rigs by hand really can be a shortcut to success and, what’s more, it’s not something that many anglers do, making it a huge tactical advantage as well. So don your waders and make the most of the margins this autumn. You’ll learn so much, and may just catch a surprise or two!