TACTIC ONE: Pellets and paste

For quick-hit sessions, small PVA bags are ideal. They enable me to cast around without leaving loads of loosefeed spread all over. If you spod an area, you are less likely to come off it because you have invested both time and money in it. With my PVA bag approach, I’m looking to offer the carp a mouthful or two at most. Anything that isn’t eaten by the carp will be picked over by silverfish. I fill the bags with a 50:50 combination of Dynamite Baits’ new Complex-T and Tigernut pellets. I like to combine two completely different flavours like this because it floods the swim with different tastes, colours, flavours and food signals. I don’t like fishing fluoro baits because everyone tends to use them at this time of year. I like to do things a little differently, to hopefully throw the carp off the scent of being fished for. I then cast every two hours either to a totally new area or to where I’ve seen signs of fish. On the hook, I have started playing around with Dynamite’s new Tuff Pastes. Again, both the Complex-T and Tigernut versions are mixed together until they become uniform in colour. I then wrap 3mm-4mm of the paste around an 8mm cork ball. Once formed, I boil the hookbaits for two minutes before air-drying them for a week. As well as being a much smaller hookbait, which works very well with the smaller pellets in the PVA bag, over a short period of time the paste wrap will start to slowly dissolve and break down. This pumps loads of attraction into the water, much more than a boilie in cold water. The other great advantage of these bespoke hookbaits is that they last for around four hours, so I am forced to recast when the hookbait starts to break down.

Matt combines these two different pellets to put plenty of taste into the swim

The two colours are a marked contrast to fluoro baits and Matt combines the two

Each paste releases different flavours but they are devastating when combined