Steve Ringer says its time to reach for the lead and bread
Steve’s winter banker when bites from carp are at a premium
WHEN fishing with popped-up bread I always like to use a Warburtons Toastie or Super Toastie sliced loaf. The texture makes it that little bit more resilient once in the water.
Preparation couldn’t be simpler. If the bread is fresh, all I do is cut off the crusts and lightly compress the slices. Each one is then cut into two and put in a clear plastic bag so that it stays fresh for the duration of the match.
As a general rule, for a five-hour match I will take three slices of
bread. Cut up, this gives me six pieces – as soon as one piece dries out I’ll swap it for a fresh one.
PUNCH SIZES
I like to carry a variety of different punches when bread fishing. These range from 6mm right up to 10mm in diameter.
As a rule, though, I like to kick off with the 8mm punch and see how things go from there. If no bites are forthcoming, I will switch to a bigger punch to make the bait stand out more. Bread works so well as a hookbait because it’s bright white and unmissable in clear water, so by going bigger with the punch size I’m trying to increase the chances of a carp spotting it. Most anglers make the mistake of fishing with a smaller hookbait when the fishing is hard, when in actual fact they should be going bigger.
As a general guide I’ll always kick off with three 8mm discs of bread on the hair – I’m not sure why, other than that it just seems to works for me.
If small fish are a problem multiple discs make sound sense. Even if they whittle away one disc there are still two still on the hair, waiting for a carp to come along.
Staying on the subject of small fish, if they are a real problem what I like to do is trim down an 8mm pop-up boilie and fish that in the middle of the hair with a real bread disc either side.
The boilie, being hard in texture, ensures that whatever happens you will always have something on the hair. This is important when you consider that quite often I will leave the bread out for up to 30 minutes.
When adopting this tactic, I like to use a vividly-coloured boilie such as a fluoro pink, to give my hookbait that little bit more visual attraction.
In case you are wondering why I don’t just fish a boilie, the answer lies in the texture of the bread. Once it’s been in the water a few minutes it swells right up so that a carp can slurp it down.
I’m sure it’s this that gives bread the edge over straight boilies.
LOCATION IS KEY
Without doubt the most important part of bread fishing is locating the carp – after all, if you can’t find any fish, you aren’t going to get any bites!
With this in mind, if I’m not catching I will cast about looking for fish. Carp don’t move around a lot in the cold, so it’s no good waiting for them to come to you… you have to go to them!
A little trick I like to use on waters that are relatively narrow and double banked is to start short. This way I leave the carp an area of the lake that they can back off into and where they feel safe, as there are no lines in the water or leads landing on top of them.
All being well, I can then catch a couple of carp early by dropping short, before gradually moving further out as the match progresses.
If I cast to the extreme boundary of my swim from the off I run the risk of maybe catching a couple early and then pushing the fish out of my swim.
Okay, my approach might lead to a slightly slower start, but over the course of a five-hour match, as a rule, it tends to produce more bites and put more fish in the net.