This article is really about my fishing last spring time, and both mine and Adrian Smiths efforts in the Autumn. It centres around the RMC complex at Frimley on Pits 3 and 4.
But I’m sure these methods would work on any mixed speciesfishery. They could well prove to be beneficial on watersthat have been dominated by boilies over the years.
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I also have to say from the start that only bailiffs are allowed to night fish on Frimley. This proved to be a huge advantage on Pit 3 but not so much on Pit 4 where 95 % of my bites came during the hours allowed on the normal ticket.This caused quite a bit of ill feeling on the RMC websitebut those complaining did not take up my offer to come downto the lakes to see how I was fishing.
Bream fishing brings a renewed enthusiasm forcarp
With the abandonment of the close season on stillwaters Ihave, over the last couple of years, given carp fishing arest and concentrated on the bream. This I have found hasrenewed my enthusiasm for carp fishing for when the seasonproper starts again it will see me heading off for therivers on the 15th June. And still unable to sleep the nightbefore.
Unfortunately the advent of the internet fishing forumshas change my fishing forever and some of you may have readmy reasons for virtually packing up carp fishing altogethernow.
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But back to the bream on Pit 4. My interest in this water came about when Ian Welch, the boss of RMC Angling, told me it had produced bream to 14lb. The water is lightly fished because of its size, 25 acres, and the night fishing ban.However, the local bailiffs often caught bream when carpfishing. Even the carp are relatively easy to catch onsimple baits like sweetcorn because they are not underconstant angling pressure. So I couldn’t resist having a goon a 25 acre water that was lightly fished, contained doublefigure bream, and in all likelihood I would be the only onefishing for them.
No fan of groundbait, so it’s out with theparticles!
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I’ve never been a fan of using big loads of groundbait for bream, mainly because I’ve never really sorted out a decent groundbait mix. I have in the past sort advice on Fishingmagic on the best types of mixes but I can never get groundbait out to the range I need to fish without it breaking up and spreading bait all over the place. I’m also not a fan of smashed knuckles, which always happens to me when catapulting out large amounts of ground bait. Catapult elastic never lasts more than a session without breaking constantly. Basically I’m a lazy angler so I needed an alternative to hold the bream shoals in my swim. Mind you, if boats were allowed then I would happily use ground bait.It would be easy to chuck it over the side.
The alternative was to use big beds of particles thatcould be spodded out to the range I needed to fish. Now Ican hear you all saying that spodding is hard work, and itis, but I get a sort of perverse pleasure in spending acouple of hours whacking a spod out to a marker. There’snothing like getting to the bottom of a big bucket andthinking that’s a job well done.
Don’t stint on the amount
I have to say now that most anglers do not use enough bait when baiting up so if you are of a nervous disposition this style of fishing may not be for you. But bream do eat an awful lot of bait and you do need to have a large bed of bait out in the lake to hold them. Now I’m the same as the vast majority of you in that cost is a major factor in my fishing. Using particles is not expensive, but you do have to search around to find the best deals and I have found that it pays (no pun intended) to stay away from the major bait suppliers. All of my particles are purchased from a pet food supplier called Jolleys who are based just outside Eastbourne. They do have other shops so look in your local phone directory to see if they have a shop near you.Alternatively, any bulk pet food supplier should be able toget the particles you need to use.
My mix contains hemp, groats, trout pellets and maggots. Obviously maggots cannot be bought from the pet food suppliers so a visit to the local tackle shop is required.After much grovelling I have found two shops who will supplyme with a gallon of maggots at cost price. This makes usingthis particle much cheaper and any not used over the sessionare frozen for use on the next trip. If you use maggots,even now, don’t throw what’s left in at the end of thesession, take them home and freeze them for use in thespring. You will be surprised how quickly the odd half pintor pint builds up.
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Continuing on the price theme I’ll tell you what I’m paying for the particles, but the maggot price must remain secret. In my local Jollys 20 kilos of hemp costs £ 13.Groats are even better value at £ 6 for 25 kilos andtrout pellets are £ 15 for 25 kilos. So for an outlay of£ 34 you have 70 kilos dry weight of groundbait. Enoughfor me anyway for three weekend’s bream fishing. How muchwould 70 kilos of boilies cost you? That’s the dry weighttoo, because once you have prepared the hemp and groats thatweight will increase and in the case of the groats theweight will double.
When I first started to get interested in big bream Iread everything I could find on the subject and in onearticle by Tony Miles or Derrick Quirk groundbait wasdiscussed at length. One particular article stated that theyhad never seen hemp in the keepsacks after fish had beenretained overnight. So they dropped the use of it in theirgroundbait. This may well be the case but why have bothAdrian and myself been so successful catching over hemp? Itmakes up 50% of my mix.
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Three big bucketsful for a weekend stint
I can’t give exact weights for mixing the particles because I just fill up big buckets and drag them round the lake. For a weekend session I will take two big buckets of hemp and groats mixed 50/50 and another one of trout pellets. I use 8mm sized pellets, but although I haven’t tried any other size myself I can’t see any reason for not using the smaller ones. It is something I will be trying this springtime when I tackle a new RMC water with bream in it to a mind-blowing 17lb-plus. Let’s quickly return to the transport of the large particle buckets round the lake. Early last November Adrian and I spent four nights and five days fishing Frimley Pit 3. To get both the bait and tackle to the swim needed two trips with the wheel barrow. The first trip was just to take the bait. I had four big buckets in the barrow and two smaller ones hanging from the handles.Once arriving at the swim I found the head bailiff watchingthe water. He was not fishing but on his rounds and couldn’tbelieve the amount of bait I had with me. After seeingAdrian turn up in the adjoining peg he wandered off shakinghis head in disbelief and mumbling something about us beingbloody mad. His views had changed a few days later when heenquired what we’d caught.
Swims and tackle
Much has been written about locating bream so I’ll not gointo that, but I’ll just tell you I picked two spots. Thefirst was on the edge of the marginal weedbeds about 10ydsout and the other was a hump at about 40yds. Each of thosespots received half a bucket of hemp and groats and aquarter of a bucket of trout pellets. Each spot also had twopints of maggots spodded on to it. Because this was thefirst trip the maggots were all live ones but on subsequenttrips a mixture of deads and live ones were used.
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My tackle consisted of 12 foot 2 1/2 lb carp rods and Shimano 4500 Baitrunners. These were loaded with 8lb GR 60. My rigs were semi-fixed swimfeeder paternosters and 6lb GR 60 hook lengths. The hooks were size 10 boilie hooks.
Hookbaits were worm and sweetcorn cocktails. the length ofthe swimfeeder tail is 10 inches and this is made up withGardner leadcore. I like this link to be heavy so that itlays flat on the bottom and hopefully out of the way. Thehooklinks are short at 4inches which I think helps with thebolt effect and hooks more fish.
After my first night the 6lb hook links were abandoned infavour of 8lb links because of the carp. I had not given thecarp much thought (because I was bream fishing) but afterhooking and losing two on the first night I had to dosomething. During the hours of darkness I had two takes thatstarted with a single bleep on the buzzer but were soonone-noters. On picking up the rod all I could do was hold itas high as I could as these scaly pests headed for theopposite bank. I could slow them down by putting my fingeron the spool but lost both fish as they weeded themselves onthe way back. By upping the strength of the hooklink Ididn’t lose any more through breakages but did suffer theodd hook-pull.
No boilies and particles pay off
The first weekend was tremendous fun, with the odd breamcoming at first light and the unexpected carp coming at anytime of the day or night. The carp definitely liked big bedsof particles. The other couple of guys carp fishing the lakewere using baitboats to drop small amounts of hemp and a fewboilies into place. They were picking up the odd fish butthe big bed particle approach outfished them both. In factafter just one weekend I became top rod, carp wise, eventhough I wasn’t fishing for them.
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The one thing I haven’t covered yet is spods. Now thereare a huge number of them on the market. The picture is ofthe Gardner range which has a spod for every occasion, so tospeak. I have tried most of them but my favourite for usingwith particles is the large four-finned model marketed asthe Bait Rocket. This flies straight and true even in windyconditions, but does suffer a small amount of bait loss fromthe back, but I’ll put up with that.
The sessions on Pit 3 produced bream to 10lb 4oz and carpto 24lb 4oz along with a solitary tench. Every trip I wasgetting far more takes than the others who fished solelywith boilies and I didn’t really mind the half hour longbattles with the carp. Not one boilie was used during theclose season and it was obvious the carp loved worm andcorn. I can’t think why I didn’t catch more tench becausethe pit holds a reasonable head of them and other peoplecaught numbers of them.
Double-figure bream and big carp
Adrian and I returned to Frimley in October after one ofthe Specimen Group members had six double figure bream in anafternoon whilst carp fishing on Pit 3. I was confident theheavy particle baiting would produce the desired effect onhere. Adrian had used something similar on a pit in theColne valley.
The first trip produced some bream up to 9lb for me and apersonal best common carp of 24lb, but the action was slowerthan Pit 4.Then we booked a couple of days off work for thepreviously mentioned four-night session. Again action wasslow on the first night using worm and corn, so I suggesteda switch to maggot hookbaits. This change resulted in bothof us having some of the best action we had ever hadanywhere. Over the next three nights I banked six breambetween 5lb and 9lb 6oz. I also lost four or five otherswith hook-pulls in the weed. But the amount of carp thatfell to the maggots was surprising, I landed commons of15lb, 18lb 12oz,19lb 5oz, 19lb 6oz, 20lb 2oz and 20lb 5oz,and a fully scaled carp of 22lb.Three more came off duringthe long fights.
Too many bites keeps me awake, then Adrian cops 13doubles!
I was getting so many indications on the buzzers that in the end I wound the rods in around at 4am so I could get some sleep. Daytime produced not a single bite, with all the action starting around 9pm. Adrian didn’t have so many carp, with a couple around 15lb, but he had bream to 10lb 5oz.
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The next weekend I didn’t fish because of the RMCbailiffs match on the Saturday but Adrian went straight fromthe match to Frimley and over two nights banked anincredible 13 double-figure bream to 11lb 4oz. Now these arenot massive by national standards but from a lake where anearly season 11lb 4oz bream to myself caused a stir at theRMC office his results on the method were opening up thelakes bream potential.
As you can see we were having a wonderful time on thepits, expecting big hits every time we went. A method thatwas used for the bream was turning over the carp in thelake. After a few weekends of us catching heavily everynight I was surprised none of the other bailiffs wereadopting the tactics solely for the carp. My best night waswhen I landed a 10lb 14oz bream, a 25lb fully scaled mirrorand a 25lb 8oz common in three hours. Also during that threehours Adrian landed a 25lb common.
Be brave and try it for carp. It’s great fun!
Hopefully this will convince you to try this method on your carp lakes, which over the last 10 years or so will have seen nothing but boilies. By using maggots Adrian and I caught more carp than anyone else fishing the lake, along with some cracking bream. Unfortunately, I never caught a tench from Pit 3 but Adrian did land a couple of 5-pounders.There are tench to 11lb in there so next spring we will goback to see if we can catch some of them. I feel by startingon Pit 3 in October we were a bit late for the big Tincasand we were still catching carp after the first frosts.
Be brave and pile in the particles and get those maggotson the hooks and just wait and see what you catch. Hopefullyyou’ll have a session or two like we did. Great fun!
