Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Pellets vs maggots for F1s – Connor Barlow
Guru’s Connor Barlow reveals the best times to use these classic winter F1 baits
WE all have a small number of favoured baits, but how do you whittle down that selection even further to get the best from each session? Some analyse the venue form guide. Others base their decision on previous success. But a large proportion use a ‘pot luck’ approach based purely on guesswork. Such a mentality will undoubtedly work in your favour on occasions if Lady Luck shines brightly, but there are times when it can lead to an avoidable disaster. If you applied a theory to your bait choice every time you went on the bank, your results would leap on to an upward curve. Guru’s Connor Barlow has the perfect formula when F1s are the primary target. “The only two baits that I have enjoyed much winter success with for F1s are maggots and pellets. More often than not, though, only one of them will work on the day,” explained Connor. “You could waste valuable time using what turns out to be the wrong bait, but analyse a few things and you will make the correct decision from the off.”
Weather conditions
One of the best ways to decide which bait will work best on the day is to study the weather. In freezing cold conditions when air temperatures have dropped below 4ºC, Connor will go for maggots. “When the going gets really tough maggots are the only bait that can buy you a bite. They are also better when it is windy. “For some reason, you can lay the rig on the bottom when using maggots and still get clear bites, but do the same with pellets and you won’t get any indications all day. “F1s feed on the maggots in a more aggressive way and will inhale them, which quickly picks up any excess line off the bottom and registers as a bite on the float. “With pellets, F1s gently mouth the bait and therefore you need to fish with the hookbait just touching bottom to spot these bites,” he explained. The way the bait behaves could also explain why one works in windy conditions and the other doesn’t. Pellets, by their very nature, remain stationary so a pellet hookbait bouncing around because you can’t hold the rig still will look unnatural. Maggots, on the other hand, are always on the move so a little bit of movement as a result of your presentation won’t stick out like a sore thumb.
Different rigs
Most of Connor’s winter F1 fishing is undertaken on snake lakes and it is the water depth that will decide where he attacks. “I will plumb up close to the far bank but I want to find 3ft of water as a bare minimum. This is usually a couple of metres away from the cover. “Plumb around to try and find a small flat spot where you can feed bait that will remain in that area. If it is on a steep slope your bait will roll away and you’ll be fishing over a patch with no freebies. “The second line is down the middle, in the deepest water I can find. This is an area that needs a little time to settle after being fed before you place a rig over the top.” When fishing pellets, Connor places a bulk of shot a foot away from the hook and has a No.11 dropper shot below that. It is then a case of lifting and dropping every minute and sticking to a strict feeding regime. “I feed 15 micro pellets every four minutes. It is important to keep a trickle of bait going through the water column because very often fish are sat there dormant, but you can effectively annoy them into feeding by moving the rig and adding a bit more bait. “Rather than ship in every four minutes I fill up a small Guru Pole Pot and slide across the lid with holes in it. I then tap out a tiny number of micros when required, with the lid making sure the rest of the contents stay in the pot until I want to introduce more,” said Connor. Float choice for pellets is a 4x12 RW Dink in 3ft of water and a 4x14 of the same pattern down the track.
On the drop
It’s a completely different ball game when maggots come into the equation because different shotting patterns are required. “When you are fishing with pellets you will find that many of your bites come in the bottom few inches of water, but with maggots they seem to follow the bait down and you can catch well off the deck,” said Connor. “They fall at a much slower rate and once the fish decide they want to feed they will come off the bottom and take maggots on-the-drop. “I string out my shotting pattern over the bottom two-thirds of the rig when fishing in 3ft of water and this makes the hookbait fall at a slow and natural pace. “In deeper water I set a bulk of shot 18in to 2ft up from the hook and have two No.11 droppers below. This quickly gets the rig through the top half of the column where no fish will be sat before slowing down the fall of the hookbait in
the zone where they are feeding.” As with pellets, a few maggots are regularly sprinkled in but the rig is lifted completely out of the water and laid in on its side every two minutes to ensure a hookbait is frequently falling through the water column. “Most of your bites will come within a minute of laying in the rig, which proves the fish are eating the bait that is on the move.” The float is a 4x10 RW Maggie in 3ft of water and a 4x14 of the same pattern down the track.
Swim attack
Partridge Lakes is one of Connor’s favourite winter haunts and Covey Canal Six at the Cheshire complex was his choice of water to display his tactics for IYCF. Starting close to the far bank, Connor tapped in a few morsels of bait. The temperatures had plummeted the night before, so maggots were the bait of choice. “I always start on my 3ft of water line because the fish tend to sit here at the start of the day simply because shallower water warms up quicker than the deeper track,” said Connor. “Even if you can’t catch straight away, persevere and keep feeding the line down the middle. Feed 50 maggots every half-an-hour in a cup to prime the swim for later on.” Action was far from instant, but by priming two of three lines that were 3ft deep he eventually found a few fish, and a pair of 2lb F1s were in the net after 40 minutes. A couple of others came in the next hour before Connor reckoned it was time to try the line down the middle. “It has been slow over the far side, but I know full well that the longer you leave the line down the track to settle, the better it will be later in the session,” he explained. With two hours gone he dropped in down the middle and bagged three F1s in as many put-ins before action dried up. By rotating lines he kept the occasional bite coming before a late flurry down the track in the final 30 minutes brought a good run of big F1s. “I’m confident that if I had fished pellets today I wouldn’t have caught half of what I have in the net. But on another day, in different conditions, it would have been the complete opposite. “Take time to read your peg, pay particular attention to weather conditions before starting and select a bait that will work from the word go,” concluded Connor.