Pellet balls – try Steve Ringer’s deadly new feeding trick.
Steve reveals how a forgotten bit of kit is helping him to win on the pools
AT THIS time of the year on smaller commercial fisheries it’s all about fining things down and presenting little parcels of bait rather than lashing it in.
The trick is to feed and fish for one fish at a time, rather than try to build up a swim, and for feeder anglers that means dropping down in feeder size to deliver only one mouthful of bait.
This might seem like negative fishing, but I prefer to call it sensible swim management, and there are a few tricks to help you turn this style of fishing into a positive result.
FEEDING AN AREA
Something I always like to do is feed an area of my swim for later on in the match, in particular the last hour when, even on the coldest of days, a few fish do tend to have a feed.
There are, of course, different ways of doing this, the most common one being to put in a few feeders on a line for later on.
Just lately, though, I’ve had much better results by using something I forgot I had in my bag – a small Nash ball maker! For those who don’t know what a ball maker is, it’s a clever little device which enables you to make little balls of wetted-down pellets, in this case 2mm micros, which can then be catapulted out to my chosen spot.
As a rule I like to feed a line anything between 20m and 30m from the bank, and rather than feed a load of little balls in one hit I’ve found it’s much better to fire out a ball every 15 to 20 minutes, just to keep it topped up.
I’ll then look to drop on this line three-and-a-half hours into a fivehour match, to see if the feeding has resulted in any activity in the swim. If I don’t get any signs after five minutes then I’ll have another look over the bait with around half-an-hour to go, which is normally the key time.
Often it’s a line that will produce only one or two bites, but these will usually be from big fish that are well worth catching!
Something else I like about the ball maker is that the little ball of pellets is very similar in size to a loaded Mini Hybrid feeder, so in effect, when I do cast over the top, my Hybrid feeder will look just like another ball of pellets.