CARP TACTICS Bait up on a sixpence!
Keeping your loosefeeding accurate is the key to better catches. Rob Hughes shows how to do it
ACCURACY when baiting up is central to success. Get it wrong, and you’ll encourage the fish to feed away from your baited rig.
On most day-ticket waters, it’s best to focus your attentions on a particular spot, such as a gravel patch or a clearing among the weed. To find these areas, you need to spend some time with a marker float set-up.
Finding the best spots
Once you’ve cast out the lead, it’s essential to feel it down to the lakebed until you feel the donk of the lead hitting the bottom. If you can’t feel the lead hit the bottom, then the chances are that you’ve cast it into weed or heavy silt. If this happens, keep searching for a more suitable spot. Keeping your line tight and the rod held high as the lead falls through the water will make this donk far easier to register.
As the diagram on the opposite page shows, once you’ve found a suitably firm spot on the lakebed, you then need to drag the marker lead back to gauge the size of the area. Ideally, you’re looking for somewhere at least 6ft square, so that you can fit your baited rigs on it easily. Once you’ve done this, it’s then a case of calculating the depth by paying out one foot of line at a time until the marker float reaches the surface.
When you are happy with the spot, switch to the spod rod and introduce some loosefeed alongside the marker float. Have a few casts and, once you’ve found the range, slip the mainline on your spodding reel
into the line clip, so that you’ll be feeding the same spot every single time.
Spodding accuracy
There is more to accurate casting than just clipping up, though. It’s also important to hit the clip correctly. Hit it too hard and your spod will bounce back towards the bank. Too soft and it won’t even reach the spot. Cast too low and again there is a risk of bounce-back, too high and it could be carried by the wind. So exactly what is the perfect way to hit the clip?
Ideally, you should be hitting it when the lead is between 2ft and 6ft above the water to get the best and most accurate drop. Remember to stand in exactly the same place on every cast too. It sounds obvious, but this simple rule can make a massive difference.
It’s important to note that the bounce-back I talked about is exaggerated when using braid, which nearly all anglers do on their spod set-ups. It’s easy to think that because you hit the clip the spod has made the distance, but if you hit it too hard and you get a bounce back of 6ft (which may not look a lot from the perspective of the bank), the loosefeed will fall well short of the target.
I can’t emphasise enough just how important it is to spend time getting your loosefeeding right. Master the skill, and your hookbait and freebies will be working in perfect unsion, meaning more fish on the bank.