How to catch F1 hybrids on commercials
THERE’S little doubting the success of the F1 carp since it was introduced to the UK angling scene over a decade ago.
With autumn here and the threat of frosts and colder nights on the horizon, Guru-backed match star Connor Barlow is your guide to solving the F1 puzzle...
MAGGOTS OR PELLETS? One of the best indicators as to which bait will work best is the weather. In freezing conditions when the air temperature has dropped below 4ºC, I’ll use maggots. These are the only bait that can buy you a bite. You can lay the rig on the bottom when using maggots and still get good bites, but do the same with pellets and you won’t get any indications!
In milder weather, typical of late-October, then pellets continue to work and are better than maggots. It’s all about keeping an eye on the weather, particularly the temperatures and basing your attack on this.
TWO LINES FOR SUCCESS Much of my F1 fishing takes place on snake lakes and water depth decides where I’ll fish.
I’ll plumb up close to the far bank, but I want to find at least 3ft of water. This is usually a couple of metres off the bank and I try to find a small flat spot where I can feed bait that will stay put. Target a steep slope and your bait will soon roll away and you’ll be fishing over a spot with no pellets.
I then have a second line down the middle in the deepest water I can find. This is an area that needs a little time to settle once it is fed before I fish here.
KEEP SOME FEED GOING IN It’s important to keep a trickle of bait going through the water column because a lot of the time the fish are about, but you need to almost annoy them into feeding by moving the rig and adding a bit more bait.
I’ll only sprinkle in a pinch of micro pellets but rather than ship in every four minutes to feed, I fill up a small Guru Pole Pot and slide across the lid with holes in it. I then tap out a tiny amount of micros when required, with the lid making sure the rest of the pellets stay in the pot.
RIGS FOR DIFFERENT BAITS You can’t use the same rig to fish maggots and pellets due to where you get most of your bites from as the bait falls through the water.
Using pellets, most bites come in the final few inches of the drop, but with maggots the F1s follow the bait down and often you’ll get a bite on the drop. This is because maggots fall at a much slower rate than pellets. To reflect this, my maggot rig features a strung out shotting pattern over the bottom twothirds of the rig when fishing in 3ft of water. This makes the hookbait fall at a really slow and natural pace. For pellets, I group the shot together into more of a bulk to get the bait down quickly, relying on two final No11 dropper shots to let the bait fall slowly just off bottom.