Tactic of the week

Dr Paul Garner on why you’ve got to try a ‘Medusa’ rig

CATCHING carp consistently at this time of the year can be tough.

But choose well-stocked venues with good winter form and with the right tactics fish can be caught without too much difficulty.

one approach that many anglers fight shy of is using maggots and worms. if you fish the rest of the year with boilies it can be a leap of faith to swap them for a couple of pints of grubs, but there’s no doubt that this bait can be the secret to unlocking winter carp.

carp love maggots all year round, but the problem is that for much of the time chances are that you will be plagued by silver fish if you use small baits.

Not now though – with the water temperature at its lowest, the silvers will congregate in one or two areas, often away from the carp, leaving your carefully placed rigs intact.

increasingly, carp fisheries are removing the unwanted silvers to enable the carp to grow larger, and once again this plays to the maggot angler’s advantage – fewer small fish make maggot fishing a much more viable option.

STEADY BAITING

one criticism levelled at using maggots for carp is that it is a very expensive way of fishing – vast quantities of bait are required. this just isn’t true in most cases, as just a few pints of maggots are plenty for a session. the maggots can be bulked out with some other feed, to keep the cost even lower.

With limited bait, and the fish often not willing to move about a great deal, accurate baiting is essential. fortunately this is easily achieved. most of the bait will be introduced in a loosely-tied pva bag, ensuring it ends up right next to the hookbait.

a blockend feeder is a good cheap alternative, but bear in mind that it can take a couple of hours for the maggots to find their way out when it is cold.

i like to recast every hour or two, which gives me the ideal opportunity to top up with bait, but if you want to leave the rigs in place then a small dot spod is the ideal way to add just another handful or two of grubs.

carp seem to worry far less than other species about the freshness of maggots. that said, i still like

my bait to be in clean maize flour to soften and freshen it up.

This might just be for my own confidence, but it doesn’t do any harm. Most of the time I will use flavoured maggots, adding a few squirts of Citruz flavour to give them some extra attraction.

For best results look for thin alcohol-based flavours that don’t thicken in the cold.

DISSOLVING FEED

Overfeeding is one of the biggest mistakes to make at this time of year. I work on the assumption that a carp is only going to eat one mouthful of food while I am fishing, so every bait that I introduce is going to reduce my chances, rather than increase them. Maggots will spread out, covering an area about the size of a dinner plate under their own steam, and can be washed much further by passing carp, so there is less chance of the fish filling up on them.

To bulk out my maggots and add more flavour into the water I use breakdown pellets. Unlike normal pellets, which keep their shape for hours or even days, these take on water fast, and in under an hour are reduced to a fine mush.

For adding attraction without feeding they are the ideal addition to a bag mix, bulking it out nicely.