5 WAYS TO WIN... with meat. Tips to try

Now’s the time when meat becomes unbeatable, and Pete Upperton knows a thing or two about winning with this bait. He’s not called ‘Pete the Meat’ for nothing!

GO SMALL WITH YOUR POLE POTS

IT’S not yet time for big pots. I’ll feed meat slop via a small Kinder pot on every drop in, but only when I’m actually fishing each line. What I want to get is an instant reaction to the slop from any carp in the peg. If I was to feed a line and leave it, I think it would merely be a waste of meat, because the fish would eat it and then move off.

BOMB IT DOWN

I WANT the hookbait to get straight to the bottom and stay still. For the island and margins, I use a 0.3g pattern with a simple bulk of No8s fixed 6ins from the hook. The same pattern features on the 5m line where the float is upped to a 0.4g size, the bulk being a little further away from the hook here at 8ins. Both floats are dotted right down and set to fish at dead depth. Hooks are a Guru Kaizen in size 16 for the margins and 18 for the other two lines.

TARGET SHALLOWS

ON A typical commercial there are lots of options as to where to fish, but I try and keep it relatively simple with three main spots.

Carp are beginning to feed in shallow water, so up against an island or far bank and in the margins are great areas, because fish will naturally live here. As long as there’s a minimum of 2ft of water, I’ll be happy.

My third area is the ‘short line’ at around 5m, just into the deeper water coming away from the marginal slope. This is something of a throwaway line for me as it can produce 100lb on the right day but, equally, may only throw up the odd fish.

SHOW THE POINT

TOP hookbait is a single 8mm cube of meat, but if the fishing was good or if I wanted to try for a big carp, I’d think nothing of using two cubes. These are hooked like a maggot, leaving the entire hook point showing so that I only have to lift into a bite as opposed to striking hard to set the hook.

MAKE A SLOP CLOUD

I’M A big believer in using meat slop in shallow water, not only because it creates a bit of a cloud, but because it gives me more pieces of feed for the relatively small amount that I’m putting in. If I fed eight 8mm cubes of meat, one carp could eat the lot. With slop, there are hundreds of pieces in the swim and so the fish stay in the peg longer. I make slop by putting the meat through a cutter to cube it and then a meat grinder, adding a little water.