DES TAYLOR “Give it time on the rivers”
Work for your prize and you’ll get a bigger sense of achievement
I’VE lost count of the times I’ve asked an angler fishing the river how he’s doing, only to be told: “I’ve tried everything – maggots, casters, corn, meat, even them boilie things you’re always going on about in Angling Times – but I’ve not had a touch”.
I’ll then ask how long he’s been there. “About two hours,” he replies. That means he’s given each bait about 20 minutes, some a lot less, and because he hasn’t had a bite he switches to the next one on his bait tray.
This happens a lot with anglers who are used to fishing commercial carp lakes and very often getting a bite every put-in. A river, though, is a natural fishery. You should know you’ll catch fewer fish, but your surroundings should more than compensate for that. Lots of anglers who have been stuck in the house during lockdown, now they are allowed out again, want to spend time in our beautiful countryside. There’s no better way to do that than by sitting on a riverbank looking down a valley. Those 50lb nets of F1s won’t come your way, but give the river a chance and you’ll catch fish that will give you a true feeling of achievement.
One of the things you need to understand is how to feed a swim and give the bait time to work. On a commercial every peg will have fish in it, but on the river some areas will be sparsely populated or hold no fish at all. Take my word for it, if you feed properly and are willing to wait, sooner or later they’ll turn up and you’ll catch.
Sometimes I will feed a river peg for an hour before I even cast in, and then be prepared to wait another hour or even longer before getting my first bite. Many is the time I’ve sat there without a bite for what seemed an age and then, in the next five hours, caught 100lb of barbel and chub.
It’s not as though you are in a match and need to get bites from the off. Give your chosen bait a chance to work. On most rivers I fish, I will introduce balls of soaked pellets into the swim and fish a hair-rigged boilie over the top of loosefed pellets.
This will catch all species – big ones at that – on the River Severn. In the past few years I have taken chub to over 6lb, roach to 2lb-plus, bream to over 7lb and barbel topping 13lb.
That would never have happened if I’d kept swapping baits every 20 minutes. Indeed, on most trips I take just the one hookbait, Nash 12mm Scopex/ Squid boilies. If I don’t get a bite after an hour I won’t switch to a maggot, because all that would do is give me fish of a size I’ve caught a thousand times before –a 4oz perch or dace. I’d much rather keep feeding and wait for that bite from a fish I will remember for a long, long time.
Next time you’re out on a river, select your bait and keep feeding it little and often. Those fish will turn up and when they do you’ll have a sense of real achievement that all river anglers feel when we have worked for our prize.