Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Spring into action with hard pellets
As the carp start their spring feeding, Steve Ringer reveals the best way to catch them
WITH the sun’s warmth finally coming through and water temperature on the rise, carp in our stillwaters have really started to move around. More importantly, they are actively coming to anglers’ baits once again. But this doesn’t mean you should start to fill in your local lake with bait. The fish still don’t need lots of feed throwing at them so you need to think carefully about your tactics. One trick which has worked really well for me is to fish the pole and feed hard pellets on a little-and-often basis over the top. This is the perfect way to take advantage of the carp’s current feeding behaviour because they will readily come to the noise of the feed, without danger of overfeeding and killing your swim with too much bait. One of the great things about hard pellet fishing is that you don’t need to take a lot of bait with you either. A pint of 6mm pellets is more than enough for a decent day on the bank. In fact, there’s every chance you will take at least half of these home with you! At most commercials where you are fishing for carp in the 2lb-5lb bracket 6mm pellets are perfect for the job. If, however, I was fishing a venue where the carp were much bigger then I would probably step up to 8mm pellets as feed instead.
How to feed your swim
When it comes to feeding then it’s very much the case that little-and-often is the way to go – just 2-3 pellets at a time. By feeding a small quantity of bait I create just enough noise to attract fish into the swim without overfeeding them. If I start to get lots of line bites then I can consider either feeding heavier to try and push
the carp down or, alternatively,alternativ, coming shallow as that’s where the carp causing the indications are likely to be. In terms of frequency,frequenc I feed 2-3 pellets every 45 seconds to starts with just to see what sort of response I get.g I try and get into a rh rhythm
whereby I feed, feed and feed until I either get a bite and catch the fish or perhaps just get an indication from something. I stop feeding when I get an indication and concentrate on catching the fish that I now know is in the swim. By adopting this approach I foul-hook fewer fish because once a fish is in the swim I either catch it straight away or stop feeding for a minute or two until it makes a mistake and picks up the hookbait. If I haven’t caught the culprit inside two minutes then I simply have to start feeding again in a bid to try and draw another catchable fish into the swim. One very important aspect of feeding is that you need to keep it as tight as possible. Because I am feeding so few pellets each time I want to avoid spreading them all over the swim. I want each pellet to be as close to the float as possible so that I can keep the fish where I want them. This makes them easier to catch and accuracy will always pay dividends with bigger catches.
Match your hookbaits
There really is only one hookbait – a 6mm hard pellet. That’s what I’m feeding, that’s what any carp in the swim are eating so it makes sense to fish the same on the hair. That’s one of the things I love about hard pellet fishing as it gives me a brilliant opportunity to ‘match the hatch’. This is something that helps trick even the wariest of fish. The only exception is if small silvers are a problem or I want to try and pick out a better stamp of fish. Then I will use 8mm hard pellets.
Lifting and dropping
Hard pellet fishing is a tactic where you need to keep the hookbait on the move so that it looks as natural as possible. I like to do this by lifting and dropping the rig so that the hookbait repeatedly rises off the bottom and falls again, mimicking loosefeed. I lift the float 10in clear of the water and then lower it down. The float then sits for 10 seconds before I repeat the process. If this doesn’t work another good tip is to lift your rig out and flick it straight out in front of the pole and hold the float on a tight line. You get a slow fall of the hookbait and bites tend to come just as the float settles. It also means you are fishing past your feed where carp often sit before moving in and out to pick up loose offerings and I often catch fish off the back of my feed.