Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
NO.1 FOR TACTICS
When it comes to fish catching potential, there are few tactics that can rival the wag and mag says Guru’s Robert Taylor
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Words & Photography Mark Parker
WAG and mag is a classic winter tactic, but even though it is one of the simplest ways of fishing, it is still easy to get wrong. You may loosefeed too many maggots, too often, bringing the fish up in the water and making them difficult to catch. Equally, you can loosefeed too little and fail to draw few, if any, fifish into the swim. Even worse, you can get ‘bitted out’, plagued by tiddlers! To find out how to fish with waggler and maggot correctly, we joined Guru’s Robert Taylor at Monk Lakes near Maidstone in Kent, to find out exactly how he goes about sacking up on this most traditional of methods. Find the fish At this time of year, you are generally doing the opposite of what you would do in the summer months. This involves sitting with your back to the wind, or out of it altogether, and fishing in the deeper water. Areas like this may only be half a degree warmer than other zones of the lake, but this can make a massive difference to catch rates. The water in winter is a lot clearer than in summer, so the fish will naturally push out into the centre of the lake. This is often out of pole range and, even if it isn’t, fifish dislike having a pole wafting above their heads when they are feeding. But the waggler enables you to explore the water easier, feeding a line but then casting to other parts of the lake ‘just to see’, which is why Robert relies on the waggler.
Advantages of the waggler
Feeder fishing may be an easier alternative, but there are a few drawbacks. The first is that you can only fish the hookbait static on the deck. Also, you can’t cast an empty feeder, so you have to loosefeed a measured amount, every cast. “The waggler gives the angler many more options,” asserted Robert. “As well as offering a better presentation, you can fish the hookbait on the bottom or at any level in the mid-layers. It enables you to get bites on the drop, as the fish compete and come up to intercept the loosefeed before it hits bottom. “You don’t have to feed every cast, like a feeder. I can easily make five casts without loosefeeding or go the other way and loosefeed five pouches of maggots over one single cast. It’s also an appealing way to fish – looking at a float is much more pleasing than watching a quivertip.”
Running line tactics
Tackle-wise, Robert uses scaled down but balanced tackle so he can attract bites and land fish of all sizes. His mainline is 4lb Guru Pulse with a diameter of 0.18mm. This thinnish line promotes easier casting of small floats because there is less resistance through the rod rings than with a thicker line. For the all-important waggler, the 29-year-old Croydon-based rod prefers a 2AAA unloaded insert float. The thin bristle enables him to see shy bites as well as the registration of every dropper shot, so he knows if his hookbait has been intercepted on the drop. “I also like to use unloaded floats in shallow water (less than five foot) because I find that loaded wagglers dive deeper on the cast and this can spook fish already feeding up in the water,” he said. The hooklink is Guru Pure Fluorocarbon. Being almost invisible in water, this gives good presentation to possibly finicky fish. The hook Robert prefers is a size 18 F1 pellet, which is fine wire but very strong and sharp. The set-up is completed with a size 24 micro swivel to help prevent hooklink spin-ups that often result when using double maggot hookbait.
“To complement the basic set-up, I have a string of No.9 shot spread evenly up the mainline starting six inches up from the tiny swivel, which also acts as a tiny dropper shot,” explained Robert.
Plumbing depth is vital
Whatever the depth it is very important to plumb up correctly. Rather than using a heavy bell plummet, which will tumble through the air on the cast, he prefers either a 10g inline Guru plummet or a swan shot because they cast better, and so allow for greater accuracy and swim mapping. Although he tends to fish at dead depth, today he set his float around 1in-2in overdepth, which helps keep the float still in wind and tow and ensures that the hookbait is always presented on a bottom that may not be completely flat. “The bites are usually more positive when you can get fish to feed hard off the bottom,” assured Robert.
The star of the show
With the ‘wag’ set-up, it was time to turn to the ‘mag’ part of the process. As a rule, the graphic designer uses two pints of reds with a handful of whites added as a change of hookbait. To fish with maggots, he starts the session by casting, then loosefeeding around 20 grubs, subsequently recasting and feeding every two minutes or so. “This is a good way to start, building the swim and the session slowly. From here, I will play it by ear, on what and how fast I’m catching.” If he is plagued with lots of small fish, he will increase his rate of feed to around 40 maggots. If the day is hard, he might cut back to 10 every cast, five or six if it’s really slow. The other beauty of ‘wag and mag’ is that he doesn’t have to feed every cast. He can also feed and then cast, so the hookbait falls through the water with the rest of the freebies. Alternatively, he can feed, cast and feed again. There are no hard and fast rules; it’s a case of judging the size of fish you are getting and the regularity of the bites to help tailor your approach to each day. The most important thing is to just keep something going in regularly – little and often. “If I am getting totally ‘bitted out’, rather than upping the feed, my first act would be to bulk the dropper shot so the hookbait quickly gets past the little ones feeding at or near the top. “If this fails, then I’ll increase the feed. The thing is that, unlike pellets which are quite filling, I can feed three or four times the amount of maggots and the fish can eat loads because they are mainly water. “It may be an underused tactic these days, due to the ease and simplicity of pellet feeders and Method feeders, but wag and mag will certainly catch you more in the cold, as well as a great number of different species,” concluded Robert.