TIME TO GIVE THEM SOME... GRUB!
TOM MAKER reveals the bold baiting approach that has served him so well down the years and helped him to take some truly staggering autumn hauls of carp...
“Once autumn arrives and the fish get hard on the feed, I like to fish an ‘area’ as opposed to a ‘spot’”
At the beginning of autumn, more so than at any other time in the carping calendar, the fish are looking for food, and lots of it too.
And this year they are particularly hungry. We have had such a hot summer, during which time the fish have spawned a number of times, the result being that they are desperate to build their weight back up and improve condition. Combine that with this month’s cooling temperatures and the onset of more favourable weather conditions for carp fishing, and it’s easy to see why October is one of the best months to be out on the bank.
DIETARY CHANGES
Tactics-wise, I always fish in a similar way, no matter what the time of year. The only thing that really changes is the baits I use and, more specifically, the amount of bait. With the fish being hard on the feed, it’s important to give them something highly nutritious that will help them to pack the weight back on quickly, and that means just one thing – boilies, and plenty of them.
I’m a big fan of Krill boilies, and they have caught me an awful lot of fish over previous autumn campaigns. There’s just something about the nutritional make-up of the bait and its attractors that ticks a lot of boxes, and once the fish have a taste for it, they seem to really get on it, feeding without caution. I’m sure that the bait’s fishy smell has a lot to do with it, and you have to remember that if they didn’t have anglers’ baits at their disposal, the carp would be actively seeking naturals at this time of the year.
With the fish actively seeking out the boilies, they become a lot easier to catch than they were in the summer months. Back then, high pressure and hot, bright weather conditions meant the fish were highly mobile and often in the upper layers, meaning that it was necessary to fish small spots and over tight beds of small particles to try to hook them.
FISH ‘AREAS’, NOT ‘SPOTS’
Once autumn arrives and the fish get hard on the feed, I like to fish an ‘area’ as opposed to a ‘spot’. An area the size of a couple of bivvies is perfect, and I feed this using an Impact Spod so that the boilies fall down in little clumps.
To give the baits a bit more of a spread, when I’m spodding the bait out, on a few casts I’ll pull the rod back by a few feet while the spod is in the air, while on others I’ll move forward slightly when the line hits the clip.
The result of this is that I can spread the bait out over an area about 12ft square, and a fish that is moving about picking up individual baits as it goes is a lot easier to catch than one that is rooted to a small spot as it feeds.
LONG LINKS, BIG HOOKS
For this reason, I always fish a slightly longer hooklink when using a lot of
boilies in my loosefeed. The harder the fish are feeding, the further into the mouth the hookbait goes and this is why the longer links help with the hooking process.
The actual rig that I use for all my autumn angling really couldn’t be simpler – it’s just a length of coated braid, attached to a big hook and a 16mm Krill Tuff One hookbait tipped with a pop-up.
Sometimes this pop-up will match the colour of the bottom bait, while at other times I’ll use a contrasting colour. Throughout the session I can play around with different combinations of bottom bait and popup to see which is working best on the day. While shooting this feature, for example, a small orange topper on my snowman produced the most bites, so I switched all three rigs to those.
BOOSTED BOILIES
The loosefeed mix I fish this rig over is also simplicity itself, comprising just a mixture of 16mm and 20mm Krill boilies, along with a few handfuls of maize.
One little bait ‘edge’ that I like to employ is to ‘wash out’ the boilies by adding some water to them in the bucket the day before I go fishing. This makes them nice and soft and also gives them a paler appearance, which I believe fools the fish into thinking that they have been in the lake for a few days, and are ‘safe’ to eat.
Over the years I’ve found that the fish get on my baited area quicker when I use washed-out boilies and, with them being so soft, they are easier to digest, meaning the fish keep eating… and I keep catching. That’s the theory, anyway!
“The result is perfect – a bait that appears and feels like it has been in the lake for days, yet still pumps out a powerful aroma”
Krill boilies releases a lot of attraction as soon as they are submerged in water, so a lot of the attraction can become diluted. To replace some of this goodness and boost the bait’s effectiveness, the day before fishing I like to add a good hit of Fish Sauce to the bucket containing the boilies and the water. Then, once I get to my swim, I give the bucket another hit of the pungent liquid, which is thin and so soaks all the way into the bait.
The end result is perfect - a bait that appears and feels like it has been in the lake for days, yet still pumps out a powerful, pungent fishy aroma.
As I mentioned earlier, to add an extra bit of colour to my loosefeed mix, I will add either maize or sweetcorn, depending on the numbers of nuisance fish present in the lake I’m fishing.
If there are a lot of roach or rudd in the venue, then I’ll opt for maize over sweetcorn, as it is more likely to still be present when the carp make an appearance.
CREATING COMPETITON
In terms of volume, I generally start off by putting out around 20 spods of my loosefeed mix. I will then top the spot up with three more spod-loads after each bite and, if I have had a few fish in quick succession, often I will put another 15 out there.
As a general rule I fish well-stocked lakes, so creating competition among the carp for the food source is absolutely key to success. Fail to do so and you might pick off the odd fish or two, whereas a swim that’s boiling with hungry carp, all fighting for every boilie, can produce memorable hits. Take today’s session, for example. I started off by blasting 20 spods out there and have been topping the swim up after each bite. Over half a day I have gone from getting a bite an hour to one about every half-anhour. This tells me that ever more fish are joining in the free feed-up and competing for the boilies almost as soon as they are being introduced.
It’s a perfect autumn carp fishing scenario, all down to the baiting strategy. Give them a boilie-rich banquet, spread it over a decent area, and keep it topped up once the bites begin. Get those three things right and you’ll enjoy a bumper end to
the season.