Quest Baits Blog

By Pat Gillett
Towards the end of April I had a week on one of the Angling Lines venues called Long Lake. I have written an article on the weeks fishing on the Angling Lines’ website. Now although I didn’t catch any massive fish I did catch a few. But the main thing that the week brought home to me was how little things can make all the difference in fishing.

On Long Lake you book a swim for the week. Each swim has its’ own ‘end of swim marker’s’ which show the angler the exact area of water he has in front of him and should stop anglers encroaching on each other’s water.
I had got swim number 4 which was pretty much in the centre of the lake but also by far the narrowest part of the lake.I set up the marker float and plumbed the depths etc. About 10 to 15 feet back from the ‘end of swim marker’ I had an area that sloped from (left to right ) 12 feet deep to 14 feet deep. Now with the weather predictions I would have thought this was perfect so I marked up 3 rods plus the spod rod to fish this area.

I started fishing on Sunday morning but by Monday lunchtime I had only caught 1 fish whereas Paul Cooper who was on swim number 3 had caught about a dozen fish. I needed to change something as my swim obviously wasn’t working for me. I reeled all the rods in and got the marker rod out again. The lake bed in swim no.4 resembled an ‘egg box’ with peaks and troughs all over the place. Just 15 foot back from my original mark I found an area of only about 12 feet wide which was between 10 ½ and 11 feet deep (I must have been more tired than I thought to miss this on Saturday). I remarked the rods and the spod to concentrate on this area. This new area produced 5 fish that first night. To cut a long story short this small area produced 23 fish for me over the next four days whilst the rest of the swim produced absolutely nothing. This just goes to show how such a small change can make a big difference. A very small change in depth and area made a massive difference. I am convinced if I hadn’t made this change I would have caught very little during the week. Its all too easy to sit there thinking your swim is dead when a ’small tweak’ to what you are doing could bring it to life.<

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I have encountered similar instances on other waters, where although there is no discernible change in the make up of the lake bed (silt or weed etc), a small change in location has made a big difference. I guess we just have to except that the carp are wild animals and a law unto themselves and as such will always have their own favourite places. Even in a relatively heavily stocked water such as Long Lake it doesn’t take much for your bait to be in the wrong place. This is something always worth bearing in mind when fishing a new water, be prepared to try a lot of new spots as quite often you may discover an underwater ‘hotspot’ that isn’t visually obvious.
Along with hemp and pellet I took Quest shelf lifes’ with me which included Rahja Spice 15mm and 20mm boilies and Special Crab 15mmboilies. This was another thing that became noticeable during the week, despite trying different set ups (pop-ups, double baits, snowmen etc.) the carp seemed to prefer a single 20mm Rahja Spice bottom bait to anything else. In fact all bar one of my fish fell to this presentation. Again it just shows how small things make a difference and how taking a variety of baits is always a good thing to do.

Cheers,
Pat

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Tags: angling, Angling Lines, bait, boilies, carp, fish, fishing, france, hemp, Long Lake, particles, pellet, Quest shelf lifes, Rahja Spice, Special Crab, tackle, techniques, tips

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Carp Fishing Sessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.