GET MORE FROM THE UK’S MOST POPULAR BAIT
Look after your maggots and they’ll repay you well
ARE you getting the best from the UK’s favourite bait? Whether you are fishing for roach, barbel or even monster carp, now is the time of the year to up your maggot fishing game as this bait really comes into its own.
Closer to the natural food of coarse fish than almost any other bait, maggots have a place in the bait bag of every angler.
MAGGOT LIFE-CYCLE
Maggots are the offspring of the common bluebottle fly, and at room temperature it takes around five days for the eggs to hatch and grow into full size larvae.
Chilling the maggots down, or depriving them of air, will slow this process down considerably, and means that you can keep bait for a couple of weeks.
The main problem with storing maggots is the accumulation of the ammonia that they excrete. Not only does this make the maggots smell, but it will also kill them. Changing the sawdust or maize meal that the maggots are stored in every few days will help keep them in tip-top condition.
You can get a rough idea of how fresh maggots are by looking at the dark feed spot just behind the head. This shrinks the longer the maggots are taken off food.
Eventually, the maggots will shrink a little if they are not fed, but as long as they are kept clean this doesn’t necessarily make them an inferior bait.
I like to use coarse maize flour to store my maggots, as this gives them a soft skin and helps to keep them fresh. The downside is that it does need replacing every few days if it’s to work. When storing maggots I like to use a lot of maize flour – roughly a 50:50 mix to maggots – to keep them in top condition. I then riddle off most of the maize on the bank so that I have almost neat maggots.
DOES COLOUR MATTER?
Rarely will I go fishing without a mixture of different coloured maggots. Often this will just be a pinch of mixed coloured grubs added to my feed bait – just enough to give me a choice of hookbait colour.
So often a change of colour on
the hook can bring bites when the going is tough, I suspect because this makes the hookbait stand out. I think this is particularly true when using red maggots as feed and a combination of white and red on the hook.
Some species of fish definitely seem to show a preference for one colour over others. Tench and grayling are suckers for red maggots. Why this should be I don’t know. Grayling, in particular, lack the eye pigment that enables
them to see red, so these baits must appear as a dull grey to them. Perhaps colour helps the maggots more closely resemble the natural food of the fish?
When fishing for roach and chub a rule-of-thumb that has served me well has been to match my main maggot colour to the clarity of the water.
The clearer the water, the darker the bait I will use, with red favoured in gin clear water, bronze when there is a hint of colour and white when the water is murky.
HOOKING MAGGOTS
Maggots make the perfect hookbait – soft enough to hook, yet tough enough to stay on.
A single maggot is best hooked through the small tag on the blunt end of the bait. Hook two maggots this way, though, and they will spin on the retrieve, especially when fine diameter lines are used.
Hook the second maggot through the head to stop this. If you are missing bites, a useful tactic is to try hooking maggots through the middle. Small fish, such as dace and roach, will tend to grab maggots in the centre, so hooking them here increases your chances of hooking up.
When fishing for larger species, such as barbel and carp, big bunches of maggots can be a great tactic, especially when used with a PVA bag of grubs too.
Modern super-sharp carp hooks enable a big bunch of maggots to be hooked on to a size 8 hook with ease, but there are alternatives that are worth trying.
One of the easiest is a maggot clip, which is hair-rigged to the hook. Maggots can then be crammed on to the clip, forming a ball of bait. I like to add a small piece of rig foam, too, to balance the weight of the metal clip.