Catch22 Challenge
Top roach tricks
THEY’RE reliable fish to catch all year round, but there’s something magical about slipping the net under a big roach on a cool and crisp autumn day.
Throughout October and November, our best-loved fish really comes into its own. Whether you’re faced with a narrow canal, a big wild river or a windswept lake, this time of year seems to awaken the roach.
Venues where you struggled to catch in the summer months suddenly become alive with fish. Migration begins too, with massive shoals of roach heading for the safety of built-up areas. If you can locate this movement, a bagging session is on the cards.
So, with a venue and a swim located, it’s time to think about tactics and, more importantly, bait. There are plenty of things to put on the hook to catch roach, and they all have their time and place depending on the size of fish you want and the prevailing water and weather conditions.
Happily, roach will eat almost anything put in front of them, including some surprising baits such as mini boilies, but year on year a proven core of baits catches the majority of roach in the UK.
These are baits you need to be thinking about, even if you may not have tried them before, as they can make all the difference.
MINI-BOILIES
NOT just a bait for carp, many a specimen roach has been caught on mini-boilies.
They’re small-fish proof, so when you get a take, it’s going to be from something half decent.
Look at buying smaller boilies aimed at the match fishing market – the 8mm versions are fine.
Classic sweet flavours are much loved by roach, so that could mean pineapple, strawberry, tutti frutti or esterberry. VERSATILITY is the strong point of worms. There are so many ways of fishing them, and they can all be used for roach.
In flooded, coloured rivers a lobworm tail will get a bite when all else fails, while on venues where casters work well, changing to the head of a dendrobaena worm gives you a tough bait that will catch several fish before it needs to be changed. To the fish it resembles a caster.
MAGGOTS
THE bait no roach angler can afford to be without. Used in large quantities, they’re the number-one loosefeed on a range of venues, but for the hook, it all boils down to the colour you use. Bronze maggots are tried and tested on rivers, while reds seem to get better results on lakes.
Fluorescent pink maggots are also worth having if your venue is heavily coloured. Maggots can be fished as a single bait to get bites, or doubled up to try and pick off a bigger roach.
BREAD
A CLASSIC roach fishing tactic on rivers is to run a piece of soft breadflake down the peg under a stick or Avon float – but using bread in a more refined manner really sees the bait come into its own.
Breadpunch is small discs of white bread that will swell up in the water, becoming incredibly soft – so much so that the fish can almost ‘slurp’ it off the hook. Punch works brilliantly in winter on canals, drains and rivers where lots of fish are present.
CASTERS
ALL canal anglers worth their salt will have a swim on the go that’s fed with casters. This bait always picks out the bigger roach in the swim. Crunchy and slow-sinking, the ‘shell’ is the No1 bait for quality fish. They come into their own on rivers when maggots are only catching smaller redfins.
Double caster is the offering to turn to for a really big roach, with the darkest baits you can find in the tub working better than the pale ones only just starting to ‘turn’.
PELLETS
A BIT of a strange one, this. For years it was assumed that roach hated fishmeal, but on commercial fisheries, they now see it as part of their diet and will happily eat pellets, boilies and fishmeal groundbait with great gusto.
When it comes to hookbaits, a soft 4mm expander pellet catches its fair share of fish.
These tend to be of a bigger stamp compared to roach taken on maggots or casters.
PINKIES
FACED with large numbers of small roach, you need something a little smaller on the hook to keep the float going under – and this is where pinkies rule the roost.
Effectively a small maggot, pinkies (the larvae of the greenbottle) are very lively and can be used as regular loosefeed or fed heavily in groundbait, fishing as singles or doubles on the hook. Of all the colours on offer, fluoro pink continues to be the most popular.
HEMP & TARES
THE classic combo of hemp and tares comes into its own in autumn and winter. Some anglers believe that hemp resembles the tiny black water snails that roach like to eat.
Maybe so, but the oil in hemp is what attracts the fish. It pumps out plenty of attraction but it can take a while to work its magic. Pick the biggest seeds that you can find for the hook. Tares are a brilliant hookbait that will often produce a bigger stamp of roach than hemp.
SWEETCORN
WE’RE in the realms of big roach when talking about sweetcorn as a hookbait. The grains are super-soft, sweet and juicy, and the fish cannot resist a niblet or two of Green Giant or its supermarket equivalents.
Even on natural venues, a switch to corn can catch a much bigger fish than maggots or casters.
In the big-fish world, anglers use fake plastic or rubber corn to prevent small-fish issues and ensure there’s always some bait on the hook.
ELDERBERRIES
DON’T laugh – elderberries picked from a tree really do catch roach, and big ones too, on rivers.
The berries look just like a tare or a large grain of hemp but are much easier to get on to the hook.
Try using elderberries when you’re catching on hemp but missing too many bites.
A take on an elderberry can’t be missed! When collecting the berries, be sure to pick the darkest, blackest ones you can find.