JAMIE HUGHES’ WINNING BREAD TRICKS
THIS WEEK: How to dob for carp
CATCHING carp is not easy at this time of year, but do your homework and you can still put a good bag of fish together.
Better still, you can bag lump after lump on just a couple of quids’ worth of bait.
The winning tactic is known as ‘dobbing’. It involves placing your rig close to an area where you think the fish are shoaled up and constantly lifting and dropping it to try and trigger a response.
Three-times Fish O’Mania champion Jamie Hughes is a master of this deadly winter approach. This week he reveals his top tips on how to get the best from dobbed bread.
SWIM CHOICE
“Carp will only be in a select few swims right now and they won’t move to look for food.
“As a result, you need to get your swim choice bang on. Look at match results to see where the fish have been caught or, failing that, pick a swim with lots of cover.
“Fish will always congregate close to islands, reed beds or overhanging bushes, especially if they have a decent depth of water underneath them.”
NO LOOSEFEED
“Put simply, you won’t feed a single thing when dobbing. The fish you are targeting aren’t interested in feeding and if you drop in any loosefeed you’ll seriously reduce your chances of a bite. They might only suck up one bit of bait and you need to make sure that it’s the one with your hook in it!
“A 7mm bread disc is the best hookbait. Use a punch of that size to obtain it from a slice, which you should squeeze to take all the air out. This will make sure it sinks rather than floats.
“The skin of a grain of corn is a good alternative, as are Bag’em Matchbaits Tuffits. These are really bright, stand-out baits.”
THE TECHNIQUE
“It’s a matter of shipping out to your target area and lowering the rig in. If you don’t get bites within 30 seconds, lift the float out and drop it in again.
“Repeat three or four times and if nothing happens, lift the whole rig out and place it a couple of feet to the left or right, or close to another feature, and do the same.
“It is all about searching every inch of your swim to see exactly where the fish are sat and working the hookbait to try and goad them into sucking it in because it’s directly in front of them – in their way, in other words.
“Start fishing a few inches off the deck and keep going deeper or shallower by a few inches to find what depth they are sat at – they are rarely hard on the bottom.”
TERMINAL TACKLE
“The moment you hook a fish when dobbing you want it to shoot out of the swim rather than thrash around in that area and spook every other fish there.
“A soft elastic allows the fish to leave the zone immediately, and I use a MAP 6-9 Twin Core. Winter carp don’t feed particularly hard so you can scale your terminal tackle right back and use 0.15mm MAP Power Optex Mainline to a 0.12mm hooklength of the same
material and a size 16 Guru Super LWG hook.”