By Darrell Peck – Mainline
With Spring just about to arrive in all its glory U.K. carper Darrell Peck reveals his thoughts on single hookbaits, baited spots and his early season approach…
Whether I am fishing a big public water or tackling a more intimate, smaller private one, location is always my primary focus. But once located, how do I decide how and what I’ll feed, right through to the most important bit, namely the actual hookbait?
A carp is a carp the world over, but it’s certainly fair to say that the more pressure a venue receives the more wary the carp tend to be. As anglers we are generally mistakenly thinking that the carp are feeding hard in the early spring because a few are starting to get caught. Looking back at my best results at this time however, they have been the result of minimal feeding and more often than not just single hookbaits.
Single hookbaits can be really devastating – I used to put my success with singles down to the fact I generally fish lower stocked waters where natural food is abundant, but I have now realised the power of singles even on the more highly populated venues, particularly if they are heavily pressured.
I remember starting on Monks Pit, Cambridge in early Spring one year where over the course of my first few sessions I caught well but without setting the world alight, casting single Pineapples towards showing fish. Being a greedy bugger though I soon became dissatisfied and wanted more so I booked a week session a month later with the intention being to absolutely fill it in. The thinking was “there’s 500 carp in here and I want to be catching more than two or three every 48hours, I want to generate multiple takes by creating a competitive feeding situation with loads of bait.”
Well, I got in the swim I wanted, found a nice clear spot and began spodding the granny out of it. Obviously, I had anticipated that the disturbance might cause the fish to leave the area but with forecast for a decent blow the following day into this area I was also confident they would return. What happened though surprised me: they turned up wholesale on the wind showing with merry abandon all over my swim, but everywhere except over the bait!
I had takes casting to showing fish away from the bait, but none on the baited patch, in fact it took four nights before I had a take from that spot despite them being there in numbers. In hindsight (a wonderful thing!) they were obviously very cautious of the baited patch – obviously they could see it because the water was crystal clear so they were just wary.
But this isn’t something that can be applied like fact to every other water – for example the exact opposite to this is when I fished a tricky lake just as Spring was about to pop and I had a great result by fishing white cork-balled Cell pop-ups over 1-2 kilos of free offerings. This lake had a huge bream population and the water was very murky, so I believe the natural food wasn’t abundant and simply that a large bed of boilies excited them.
This brings me nicely to the actual hookbaits themselves. At one pit venue I never fed a single boilie but just cast homemade fruity pink pop-ups at showing fish. From my experience I would say bigger pit fish are the most prone to bright singles, most probably because just by making them aware of the hookbait you give them more opportunity to take. Sounds simple logic, but I think nomadic carp often feed on sight and if they can see it and they are in the mood then the chance of them taking it is good. On the other hand, on small, heavily pressured waters where they regularly encounter rigs I think they can be a little cuter. In this situation I don’t think you can do any better than matching the hatch as such, using a naturally coloured bait that in an ideal world mimics something they have seen lots of in recent times.
If you want to take match-the-hatch to the next level then it doesn’t come any better than a cork-balled version using the exact same paste the actual boilies are made from, whether it be wafter or pop-up. Cork-balled hookbaits are a pain to use, no doubt, but they certainly mimic free offerings best!
Mainline Baits available at these retailers in South Africa: All Out Angling, Fishing Pro shop, SNZ Tackle, Ben’s Corner, Timols, Mias Benoni, Mias Robindal, Mias Woodmead
