New underwater film series has been a real eye-opener for me!
I WISH I had a quid for every time someone said to me: “I wish I could see what’s actually going on underwater when I’m fishing” – well, now we can with the release of Guru’s
Fishing Gurus Underwater film series on its YouTube channel!
The first episode is out now, with three more soon to follow, and we’ve looked at exactly what happens under the surface when fishing the feeder for carp.
The results have been eye-opening, to say the least. Some of our findings have been totally at odds with what we’ve always believed to be the case.
That’s why, for this week’s
Ringer to the Rescue, I’m taking you behind the scenes and revealing the five things that episode one taught me.
Some I never knew about, some I had a hunch about, others showed me I’ve been doing things wrong for years!
1 BAIT COLOUR IS MASSIVE
I’ve always thought that, in clear water, yellows and whites are better, whereas in coloured water it’s pinks and oranges.
What the underwater footage showed me was that, in clear water, the carp struggled to pick out a yellow or white wafter but could home in almost immediately on a fluoro pink bait. We could certainly see a pink bait on screen far easier, and the fish seemed to be of the same opinion. It’s now got me seriously thinking that if I could only have one colour of wafter to take for all levels of water clarity, it would be fluoro pink or orange!
2 PACK THE PELLETS ON
I was fishing in 12ft of water and, for my first cast, I put the micro pellets on to my Hybrid feeder the way I always have done – harder for the base layer and softer for the top layer, so I’d get a quick breakdown. I got that all right, so much so that when the feeder landed on screen, the top layer of pellets had gone and slowly drifted down on top of the feeder a few seconds later. They’d broken down several feet up in the water!
That surprised me a lot, and only by really squeezing the feeder and pellets hard could I get them to stay on until hitting bottom.
3 DON’T MOVE A MUSCLE!
Tommy Pickering had the famous saying ‘don’t move the feeder’ but, until now, I’ve always felt we would never be sure just how far a slight movement on the rod tip or a line bite from a fish would actually move the feeder. The answer was simple – ‘a lot’!
Even a two-inch pull on the tip from a line bite physically dragged the feeder off screen, and the same thing happened when positioning the rod after casting. These were only light movements, but they translated to a considerable distance underwater, and it got me thinking that if this happened again I’ll have to wind in and recast. I just couldn’t be certain what had happened out in the lake, and it would be playing on my mind.
4 PROOF A RIG WORKED
I’d always suspected that the way I have my wafter hookbaits on a bait spike inside a looped hair rig gave me good presentation, but the underwater footage showed me just how good. When a fish came into the swim, sucked the bait in and spat it out, the wafter returned to its optimum position, even with a heavy size 10 QM1 hook.
The fact that the wafter can pivot inside the loop makes this happen, whereas had I put the spike on the end of a normal single-strand hair, the hook could’ve been masked beneath the bait or sat at an angle that wouldn’t have resulted in a positive hookhold on the strike.
5 ADVANTAGES OF A HYBRID
The underwater footage showed me how much longer a Hybrid feeder retains bait attraction from the micro pellets in the peg.
A Hybrid doesn’t empty immediately, but keeps some pellets inside the feeder body and close to the bait. If a couple of carp do come in and clean up the pellets that have come off the feeder, but don’t take the hookbait, there’s still some feed remaining to give me the chance of a bite next time a carp comes along.
Until I saw this happening with my own eyes, I couldn’t be sure.