The Coach Feeding the margins
THIS WEEK: Adapt your feed to autumn and catch more carp
THOSE colder mornings and darker evenings we’re now starting to see will have been felt by the fish we’re after each weekend.
But while you can scale down hooks and lines and fish different parts of your swim, if you don’t get your feeding right there’s little chance of a steady day’s fishing in the first place.
I’m not saying that you need to go into full winter mode yet, but it pays to start trimming back on how much bait you are feeding at the start of a session and during it.
Big potting, for example, using a large pole cup on your cupping kit, begins to lose the effectiveness it enjoyed through the summer, so replace it with a small pot on the pole-tip to regulate how much bait is going in. What you feed is also worth thinking about. Meat and corn can still work but the fish may be far more responsive to micro pellets or dead maggots. There’s a lot to take in and, of course, no two days are quite the same... but as a rule in October, I do begin to make changes regarding how I feed for commercial fishery carp and F1s in the margins…
HOW MUCH FEED AND WHEN TO FEED IT?
For carp I would use the larger Matrix Flexi Pot, which takes around 75ml of bait. This is filled to the top each time. I feed all this in one go to form a precise pile of feed on the bottom over which I can present my rig.
However, I don’t feed like a robot, in other words every time I drop in. I prefer to introduce bait only when I think that the pile of pellets already fed has been disturbed by a feeding fish, when I need to put more in to recreate that homing-in point for the carp.
FEED – SMALL OR LARGE?
It’s micro pellets every time, perhaps with a little bit of groundbait on the odd occasion on venues that have a track record of responding to groundbait.
My favourite micro pellets are Spotted Fin Go2. I soak these so they take on as much water as they can, as this ensures that every single one will sink quickly.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CARP AND F1s
There’s one change that I make for these two species, and that’s the size of Flexi Pot used. For F1s, I drop down to the 25ml pot to introduce much less feed than for ‘proper’ carp.
OPEN-WATER FISHING
Faced with deeper water well away from the bank, pots aren’t so important and I’ll often pick up a catapult. The thinking is that there are more fish to catch at this range and they’ll be on the bottom, so I fire in 4mm or 6mm pellets depending on the size of fish I’m after.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule to this, but I’ll only feed if I am trying to attract carp into the swim or once I have hooked a fish, never directly over the top of a rig that’s in the water and fishing.