ROB HUGHES’ DIARY
IT’S PELLET TIME! Rob breaks out high-oil pellets on a trip to Wraysbury South Lake – with devastating results…
SO, WE’RE well and truly in the thick of summer carp angling at the moment. Back to busy lakes once again, and the fish seem to be stacking up to get caught.
As with all times of year, food availability plus the carp’s nutritional requirements leads them to eat certain things more than others. Post-spawning, they want to get as much energy into their bodies as possible. This gives us a fantastic window of opportunity to make the most of a relatively cheap and very easy to use bait – pellets. They’re one of the fastest, easiest and simplest ways of triggering competitive feeding.
I’m not talking micro-pellets and PVA bags here either. Nor am I suggesting 4mm pellets as part of a spod mix. This is straightforward pellet time, the bigger the better. Fours, sixes and even 10 millers are my choice.
The lockdown allowed me to do significantly more watching than I normally can, and it was fascinating to see the behaviour of the fish. I’ve been feeding them various different things, from boilies to pellets to particles and also some natural food items like prawns and mussels. What became really apparent was how much they like pellets. Of course, they’ll eat almost anything at the moment, but I noticed they were definitely favouring pellets, not just because they ate them first, but also because of how many they ate.
I’d watch carp drift in and pick up two or three boilies before swimming off and maybe coming back later for another pick. They’d have a little graze on the particles, maybe enjoy a natural or two, but they went into an absolute frenzy over the pellets and would gorge themselves stupid. Often there was more than one fish competing to get to them, and while they’d sedately snack on the other items, they’d fight over the pellets, regularly bumping each other out of the way. When it came to heading out for the next instalment of the Dynamite Day Ticket Travels series with Ian Russell, pellets were well and truly at the forefront of my mind. Armed with a few kilos of Dynamite’s Marine Halibut pellets in various different sizes and my favourite Hit N’ Run hookbaits we headed to Wraysbury South Lake for a bit of a bait test. Like many carp, the fish here were originally raised on pellets. On the back of what I’d seen, I decided it was going to be an all-out pellet approach with a few boilies mixed in and a pink Hit N’ Run pop-up fished on a Ronnie over the top.
It went like a dream and the pellets cleaned up. With so many feed options these days a lot of people lean towards particles and corn as their main spod mix ingredients. Pellets get overlooked but are devastating at this time of year.
A key edge is to use a mix of different sizes in your pellet spod mix. It also pays be fairly accurate when introducing them. A tight bed draws the fish in and creates competition. Trickle a bit more in after each bite, too, or you’ll get cleared out and they’ll move on.
Finally, another little edge in warm weather to add an extra splash of fish oil – especially krill or tuna – to your pellets. Letting them sweat a bit in hot sunny conditions makes them even more active and effective. Once the carp have settled down after spawning, and certainly as soon as we get to mid-July and the water is at its warmest, I’ll back off the high-oil pellets and fish standard pellets or particles again. However, at the moment there’s a short but devastating window of opportunity for high-oil pellets and we’re currently smack in the middle of it.