HOW TO FEED ON RUNNING WATER

Accurate plumbing is essential before anything goes into the swim

ON the face of it, pole fishing on rivers looks simple. There is no reel to think about, you can always go back to exactly the same place, and everything can be kept tight.

There’s an awful lot more to it than that, though. This week we’re looking at feeding of the swim and bait presentation…

PLUMBING THE DEPTH

Before you start fishing, always get into the habit of plumbing the depth. A good tip here is to start the depth check at the maximum length of your pole and then work back towards you. It’s much easier to search out nearside shelves and drop off this way.

Once you’ve plumbed the depth, mark it off on the side of your pole with correcting fluid. If you’re on a river that is affected by locks, tides from downstream or rain from upstream, slip the plummet on every so often to ensure your depth setting is still correct. It can mean the difference between catching and not.

GROUNDBAIT MIX

My favourite groundbait for river fishing is Bait-Tech Pro Natural original, mixed with varying amounts of molehill soil.

This mix will hold a lot of feed if I want it to, and I’ve developed massive confidence in it over the past few years.

STARTING POINT

So what depth do you start at when you’re pole fishing on moving water? My advice would be to set the float at dead depth or maybe an inch or so off the bottom and go from there.

When you ‘ball it’ you can often start catching immediately, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of not changing anything after that.

CHANGES

Watch any good pole angler in action and it’s odds on he will always be changing something in order to try and catch quicker, or catch better fish.

Try taking depth off the rig an inch or two at a time and see what the response is.

Conversely, try adding an inch or two. You will often find in moving water that the better quality fish prefer to take a hookbait that is fished overdepth.

PRESENTING HOOKBAITS

Because the rig is always in line with the end of your pole, you can achieve the best possible control. Sometimes it’s worth slowing the rig down by holding the pole still, which in turn holds the float back.

This where you’ll need a range of float sizes to cope with the flow.

LENGTH OF LINE

I make up my rigs on five sections of line, which gives me in the region of five metres at the start.

In pacey water, however, I’ll often add a metre of line if I need to run the float down the swim further.

TOPPING UP

I mentioned earlier about feeding to response. On a river where there are plenty of fish, you can top up every 15 to 30 minutes via your pole cup.