Steve Ringer Pellet tricks for skimmers in the cold
Pellets are key – but not always fished as you might expect
IF I had to pick one species to target in the cold on commercials, it would have to be skimmers because they’re just so relaible!
Skimmers seem to be less fickle than carp or F1s once the temperature drops, so a few bites are normally guaranteed. One venue in particular that provides brilliant winter skimmer sport on the pole is Barston Lakes, a favourite haunt of mine.
Whether they’re hand-sized fish or chunky two-pounders, you’re always assured of some bites – but you can never quite be sure what stamp of fish will be in front of you. That’s why I always like to rely on pellets in winter, as they normally produce decent fish every time the float goes under.
However, small skimmers love a pellet too and the trip to Barston for this feature was a classic example of this. I was thinking with the weather being so cold that the fishing would be hard, and I’d maybe catch 15 or 20 big skimmers for 30lb-plus.
Instead I had a bite every drop-in in from 30 minutes onwards, but the stamp was much smaller than I expected, even though I still caught my 30lb.
BAIT
In terms of bait, unless it’s absolutely Arctic cold I always prefer a pellet attack for commercial-water skimmers. I feel it’s a more positive way of fishing and nine times out of 10, if you can catch skimmers on pellets, you will always beat the maggot and groundbait anglers.
As a guide, today I had with me a pint of wetted-down micro pellets and two pints of wetteddown 4mm coarse pellets. For skimmers I like to mix together Ringers R4s and Dynamite Baits F1 Sweet pellets in a ratio of 70:30, as I feel that the F1 sweet pellets add a little bit more flavour, which skimmers love.
On top of that I brought half-apint of 4mm and 6mm expanders for the hook, plus the same of hard 6mm pellets in case the peg was solid and I could catch on a hard pellet, as opposed to a soft one.
Sometimes you will find that while a 4mm or 6mm expander will produce a bite every drop-in, the stamp of fish will be mixed, whereas put a hard pellet on and you’ll be able to pick up the larger ones every time.
RIGS
For those that don’t know, Barston is a relatively shallow venue, and at 13m I had around 4ft of water,
making float choice a 4x12 MW Steady. This is a relatively light float that allows me to catch ‘through the water’ – quite often you will catch the bulk of your skimmers just as the float settles, almost as if they are following the bait down.
Mainline was 0.15mm N-Gauge to a 6ins hooklength of 0.12mm Pure Fluorocarbon, my hook being a size 16 Guru F1 Pellet for expanders and a size 16 Super LWG for hard pellets.
I always kick off using my usual strung bulk shotting pattern, in this case made up of No10 shot with the bottom one 6ins from the hook and the rest of the droppers spaced at 1.5-inch intervals above this.
However, if I start to miss bites, I will tighten the bulk up to make the rig more positive. The same applies if I’m waiting for bites – tightening the bulk means I get the
hookbait down that bit quicker.
Finally there’s elastic choice, and it was an interesting one, as I kicked off today on Blue Hydrolastic. I felt this would give me a better chance of landing any bonus fish that might come along, but after 90 minutes the stamp of fish I was catching was much smaller than anticipated so
I simply dropped down to Yellow Hydro, which is much better for smaller fish.
WHERE TO FISH
At times you can catch skimmers short, at say around 7m or 8m, but I always prefer to start long. If it’s hard, there is a chance that I won’t catch short at all.
Take today, for example – I started at 13m but once it became obvious after two hours that there were a lot of fish present I was able to take a joint off to catch faster. Come the last hour I was able to come right in to six joints (around 9m) and still keep catching.
What I will say, though, is that if I take a pole section off I need a quick response, so if I don’t get a bite inside two minutes of changing I’ll pop the joint back on and go out. What I will do for five minutes before I drop short, though, is feed a little short of the pole-tip, so that when I do swap over it isn’t such a big move as there has been a bit of bait dropping in there beforehand.