Bait tips for success on the river – Dr Paul Garner is your guide.

Paul Garner’s best choices for river trotting

FEW things are more enjoyable than trotting a float on a river.

Not every swim lends itself to this tactic, but if you can find a spot where the flow is concentrated just a couple of rodlengths out or closer, why not leave the feeder rods at home and sample this simple pleasure?

Floatfishing is often considered to be a small-fish tactic, but this doesn’t have to be the case. When legering, low, clear summer conditions can make fish unresponsive and bites hard to come by until late in the day.

Worked up with regular feeding, those same fish can be suckers for a trotted bait, even during the heat of the day.

FEED THE SEED

Hemp is a mainstay of my summer river fishing. It is probably the best barbel attractor there is, and chub are certainly turned on by it too. You can get through quite a lot of it, as I like to give the fish a good pinch of this feed every time I retrieve the float.

Always, whatever the bait, bait up before running the float through, so that the hookbait follows the loosefeed down the swim. If you are going to be doing a lot of river fishing, buying dry hemp in bulk a and preparing it yourself makes financial sense.

I always keep a couple of pouches of ready-prepared bait in the back of the car, though, just in case I run low on fresh hemp.

I tend to keep my baits simple, and will take just one other bait with me as feed. This will likely be 6mm halibut pellets, or meat cubes of a similar size.

Casters can be a good, if pricey, option, but maggots are generally best avoided until later in the year because small fish can be a real pain and almost impossible to feed off, no matter how many grubs you throw at them.

DON’T MIX BAITS

Many river anglers mix several different baits together as feed. That might seem a reasonable thing to do, but it often means you are spreading the bait out much more than you want, as different baits sink at different rates.

Hemp is likely to be the fastestsinking bait that you introduce, taking three seconds to sink a foot. Maggots and casters take around five seconds, pellets a similar time, while meat can take up to 10 seconds to make the same journey. If you are feeding more than one bait, keep them separate and introduce the slower-sinking ones further up the swim.

Better in fast-flowing or deep swims is to use a bait dropper. About half the bait released will be deposited roughly a metre below the spot where it touches down before slowly dispersing, and the rest will be washed downstream.

Crucially it will already be close to the bottom, producing a trail of bait to work the float down.

BURIED HOOKBAITS

For chub, and especially barbel, a bait tripping along the bottom will bring a lot more bites, but runs the risk of the hook continually catching on the bottom. This annoyance can be partially eliminated by careful bait choice.

One of my favourite baits for this style of fishing is mini-cubes of meat. Spam is my bait of choice, as it has the perfect consistency for burying the hook, without

impeding the setting of the hook on the strike.

Cube size depends on how wary the fish are – the more cautious the fish, the smaller the baits I will use. A 6mm bait is the ideal starting point, being large enough to easily conceal a size 12 hook.

If you have a meat cutter then cubes are really easy to prepare. A good tip is to put the tin of meat in the fridge for an hour before cutting it up, as this will harden it up and make it much easier to handle. Once the meat is cubed I add a teaspoonful of barbecue sauce to give it an attractive flavour. Put the cubes back in the fridge and leave them overnight to soak in the flavour.

My second line of attack will be an 8mm hooker pellet. Use a brand that is not too soft, as ideally you want to get several runs through with the same bait.

Once again, bury the hook inside the bait to stop it catching.

Stringy paste is a third alternative well worth trying. Moulded around the hook, I am sure that the fish eat this as it trundles past, thinking it is just another pellet.

Cubes of meat are my favourite trotting bait.

...flatten it and lay the hook in the centre ...

... and finally fold it around the hook.

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Burying the hook in the meat means it’s far less likely to catch on the bottom.

To hook meat, start by pushing the hook point into the corner of the cube...

...then push the point back into the meat.