How long should I leave between casts at this time of year?

Huw Jones, Bridgend

“How often I cast will depend on how many fish I’m looking to catch”

IN SUMMER it’s all about building a peg with regular casting to get a bed of bait on the bottom, but in winter it’s usually about catching one fish at a time by setting little traps.

How often I cast will depend on how many fish I’m looking to catch. If my realistic target is five carp, then I don’t need 80 casts to catch them!

As a guide, if I was aiming to catch the above amount, I would look at anything from 10 to 20 casts to achieve this over the course of five hours. In this scenario I would start off fishing 15-minute casts and then feeling my way in accordingly.

If I got a good response to 15-minute casts, I would carry on. However, if there was no response and very little was being caught around me, I’d look to leave the feeder in longer, perhaps for 30 minutes. When the fishing is very hard, there are definitely times when the longer your feeder has been in the water, the more chance you have of getting a bite.

DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Of course, mixing things up can also work well at times, and on occasion you might want to try to make a bite happen, rather than sitting and waiting for one.

There are several ways you can do this, but one that often works for me is to make two quick casts – say two minutes apart – and then have the third chuck at 30 minutes.

All three casts will go to the same spot, the idea being that the two quick casts get some bait on the bottom and the longer cast gives you time to wait for the carp to find it.

Another little trick is to cast

and empty the feeder on the surface, basically as soon as the feeder hits the water.

Then reel straight back in, reload the feeder and cast back to the same spot. Sometimes, bait falling through the water can help to drag a carp that is off bottom down to take the bait.

BITE TIMES

Bite times will also dictate how often I cast. For instance, I will time every cast from the off, and once I have caught a few fish, a pattern will start to emerge.

You’ll notice that the bites have all come within a certain time frame, for example eight to 10 minutes. In this case, I can adapt my casting times accordingly.

If I have been fishing 20-minute casts, I can shorten them down to 15 minutes. There’s very little point in leaving the feeder out for 20 minutes if the last bite I had came after 10 minutes.

It makes far more sense to recast after 15 minutes so that I am spending more time fishing at the actual bite time.

It’s always worth timing every cast and making a note of how long the feeder has been in the water every time you get a bite. You will find it amazing how often a pattern you can take advantage of quickly emerges.

Sometimes, however, a bite pattern will start to fade as the day goes on. If you have found a pattern and it’s worked for maybe two hours, but then you have a really quiet spell, you may need to lengthen the time to settle the swim down again.

If you aren’t catching, then repetitive casting every 15 minutes to the same spot is rarely a way of getting bites again. It’s much better to have a couple of 25-minute casts to reduce the disturbance so hopefully the fish can resettle.

If that fails, you might need to move out into the lake a couple of metres so you are fishing in ‘fresh’ water. Carp often move if disturbed, so it might just be a case of finding the shoal again.