It's a lovely venue in that you can pick and choose how you attack it. The charity matches down here run by Martin and the guys revolve around "biggest fish" and "heaviest bag" sections. The largest fish is carp orientated while the heaviest bag is all silvers - no carp to count. I fish the silvers section just because I like being busy.
I know that the roach will always feed on The Alps, but the Bream and Tench fishing has really been coming on over the past 12 months. The bream grow big and five pounders seem fairly common. Keeping the roach coming for a long period is the challenge in here, but I know I can catch them. So, after much deliberation, today became a Bream day. I chose a peg at the far end of their main lake. Personally I think that most of the bigger bream live at this end. It was definitely the best smelling peg I've ever fished! I was surrounded by wild Mint!
I like fishing double-bulk rigs on the pole for bream. It's probably just me, but I sometimes find them a real pain to get shotted correctly. I manage, obviously, and catch a lot of fish on the rig but I wanted to experiment a bit today with how heavy I could actually make that bottom bulk! A gentle rise of the bristle isn't always that easy to spot when there's a bit of chop on the water or light conditions aren't 100%. If I could get away with a weightier 'dropper' then hopefully a more prominent and visible lift of the bristle would be unmissable, right?! Sometimes you end up doing things just because "that's the way it is".
I wasn't going to faff about with the roach that I knew I could catch, so my side tray was much more pellet orientated that it usually is here. Apart from half a pint of maggots (just in case) I wanted to feed dampened pellets and a little bit of corn over a bed of dark groundbait. There is normally a little bit of clarity in the water here so using Sensas Tracix I dyed the 50/50 fishmeal/leam mix to ensure that my corn hookbaits stood out like little beacons on the feed over the clay bottom. In theory, the reason I added the leam was to create a larger "dinner table" of feed without adding too much in the way of feed particles. The feed was spread more thinly, but more evenly than would have been achievable with fewer, more concentrated balls. This year I have quite often been starting with six balls of sweet fishmeal here. Today I put twelve in at the start! Obviously this was spread more widely, but overall contained roughly the same amount of actual feed as a standard six balls. If I was lucky then I may well have ended up with a swim full of "slabs", so I didn't want to cram them in on top of eachother. This will definitely be something I play around with a lot more in future. The benefits are obvious I think.
The groundbait contained mostly dampened micro's and a few grains of corn to ensure that mine wasn't the only one down there. I usually fish expanders for these fish so this was a nice change and trial with a more visible bait. Naturally I had some of those with me as well, just in case...
Over the top I wanted to try feeding only small balls of dampened micro pellets. I normally top up with groundbait here but wanted to try something different. For a bit of variety, my pellet mix contained 1mm, 2mm and 4mm pellets. The smaller ones would hopefully keep them grazing for longer, while the larger ones would be a nice reward! That was the theory anyway!
Now that I've talked myself up like a complete legend, let me tell you a little story about what really happened!.............................................................................
Basically, I felt like I was living an actual fishing nightmare! I wasn't comfortable with my pole roller positioning, I forgot to bring my cupping kit(!!!!), I broke a short no.4 for my pole and everything went wrong at the moment I started lobbing groundbait to 13m like a complete amateur! How could life possibly be any worse than that?! How could it?! Seriously!!!! Shoot me now! I ruined the peg in less than 30 seconds.... From that point on, the fishing wasn't easy but knowing the venue I did still manage to learn a lot from the session.
I'd set up two double bulk rigs. I quite often like to have two similar rigs for the same line - one positive, one negative.
With only the Bream in mind, even the negative was a positive one this week - a 1.5g float with an olivette bulk and two no.9 droppers set 1" above the bottom, on top of the 6" hooklength. Hook was a 16 Drennan Silverfish Pellet.
The 'positive' rig was a beaut! Including a 1.5g Garbolino DC8 float (one I use for paste fishing), the main bulk set 30" above the hook came to roughly 1g. Set 6" above the hook in similar fashion to the above was a 0.5g combination of tungsten putty wrapped around a Cralusso Match Quick Snap. Considering the increased amount of weight in this bottom dropper I wanted the line below it to move and 'swing' freely to ensure the fish felt as little resistance as possible when initially picking up the bait. Obviously, if the fish felt inclined to take a bait and go as far as lifting the bottom dropper then the extra weight incorporated in to it would give a very positive lift of the float. Much more visible and positive than the accepted shotting pattern! It's obvious, but there are numerous theoretical reasons why it wouldn't actually work.
I didn't necessarily expect a 0.5g 'dropper' to be a successful conclusion, but it was an extreme starting point to work my way down from. Tungsten is not only a denser material than anything shot wise (so you get a smaller weight), but being malleable I could also make adjustments very easily. What I tore off the dropper, I could mould around a shot further up to keep things even.
As it turned out, today wasn't the best day to be trying these things. For a start, despite trying to avoid them, I settled initially in to catching a slow but nice string of dumpy Roach. Nice fish too, they were all 4-8oz. The bites were all prolonged 'pull-unders' though, so not a good test for the double bulk and it's 'lift' advantages. The roach just don't feed like that. The skimmers didn't really seem to be showing like they normally do either. To start with at least. In hindsight this probably wasn't helped by my bombardment of bait which I would have much preferred to have cupped in! ...although I knew this straight away.
I actually like to fish just one line on days like today. I know that I won't catch as many as I would if I fished multiple lines and gave the fish time to settle etc, but by fishing a single line I get a minute by minute update on what fish are moving in to the swim and what is actually happening under the water. That one line was at 13m. The bottom was still sloping away at that point, but it was only an inch deeper at 14.5m. Six inches shallower at 11.5m. Total depth was about 7 feet.
I stuck to maggot baits mostly, the fishing was that hard! I caught on corn too but to give the rigs as much of a testing as I could, I stuck to the one bait that got me most bites. The skimmers love maggot in here too so it was no bad thing. I just wanted to get some bites, catch what was there and watch the float going up and down.
With the heavier rig in particular it was a really interesting day, playing around. Bites with the 0.5g dropper were iffy to say the least. I'll experiment a lot more in future as one session will never prove a point, but I was often getting weird, half-lifts. Sometimes, on the rarer occasions when it really popped up fully I often missed the bite completely. This wasn't normal. My conclusion on this occasion was that the weight is just too much for the fish, and as soon as they felt it they dropped the bait immediately. I'm sure that this is what you (and I) would expect to be honest, but since you might fish the Lift Method for Tench and consider using an SSG (and catch!), it made sense to start heavy. 0.5g isn't too much more than a single BB shot.
I switched occasionally to the 'normal' rig just for comparison. I didn't catch any more fish on this one to be honest, but it was certainly a lot harder to spot bites on the skinny bristle and smaller droppers. In the end I only used the heavier rig. I suppose the thing with the lift method is that you really don't need a fine bristle. As long as the weight of the droppers acts positively on the bristle then you will see bites - which is the single most important thing! I'll be using these floats a lot more (and other thicker varieties) in future. With the ripple and light, I just couldn't see my usual floats. It made a world of difference.
Eventually things started to come together. Again, I need a similar session to test things further but by the time I'd reduced the heavy dropper to roughly 0.4g, 0.3g and finally 0.2g, bites became more positive. I'm certain this also coincided a little with the arrival of some better skimmers/bream as well. I wasn't thinking fast enough at the time to increase the weight again. When they've got their heads down the double bulk obviously comes in to its own. That 0.2g weight seemed to be doing a nice job though. Bites were positive and I wasn't missing any. It was certainly a lot heavier than my usual 2 no.9's (or 8's) as well, and was enough to see the float lift much more visibly when each fish took a liking for the bait. Not quite like it was with 0.5g down there, but... I'm not going blind just yet. It was fun seeing half the float's body pop up out of the water though!
After a really hard but rewarding day I ended up with three of four bronze ones, a handful of skimmers and a little net of quality roach from earlier in the session. I didn't do a lot right in terms of feeding, but playing with rigs was interesting.
In a way I'm starting from scratch with the double bulk setup, having used it a lot over a number of years. Next time I'll incorporate a hair rig for it's anti-eject properties as I'm keen to try the heavier dropper with a bait that can't be spat out - even if it's as small as a 4mm pellet or a few banded maggots. It's then that I think the free swinging hooklength will come in to its own too.
Over n out!
Oh, as an aside, and just because I have so much to moan about today; why is it that you can fish all day in the sunshine and then the second you decide to pack up...... it rains! Wet kit, smelly car.
0 comments:
Post a Comment