Beat The Bubbles!
Lots of commercial fisheries around the country have been established for many years now, and age starts to take its toll changing the way we have to approach these venues.
Lots of commercial fisheries around the country have been established for many years now, and age starts to take its toll changing the way we have to approach these venues.
One common issue you’ll find on many venues is that; the bottom can be silty and so, it isn’t unusual for your swim to resemble a bubbling jacuzzi once you’ve fed some bait!
Easily one of the most frustrating situations for an angler is to seemingly have a peg full of feeding fish, indicated by bubbles over the bait, but getting bites from them being near impossible.
This is where bait choices can be key to having success on waters where the bottom is either soft, or silty.
Today I’ve bought the cameras to the amazing Snake Lake at Puddledock Farm Fishery in Essex, this place is a match anglers paradise – full of carp and purpose designed for pole fishing.
Approaches can vary, with fishing to the far bank being great, the margin fishing is amazing too but it’s the deeper water on the short pole line which we’re focussing on today.
Feed just a single pellet and there’s a good chance plenty of bubbles will follow, so soft is the lake bed.
It’s at this point you need to take a look at bait choices over everything, if you cannot find a firmer area of the lake bed with the plummet, then bait is your only way of turning the tide in your favour when it comes to turning bubbles into bites.
Bait Choice
For me, on venues like this my first choice is always paste, this is a super-soft hook bait which the carp suck in with the guards down and as a large, visible bait amongst the clouds of silt it’s something that the carp can home in on unlike a smaller banded pellet etc.
Visibility is a huge factor on silty and soft bottomed venues where you get plenty of bubbling in the swim, so often the amount of bubbles can give the illusion that your peg is full of fish, but it could actually be just one or two fish turning over the bottom, causing a large amount of disturbance.
My paste mix is as simple as it gets, no fancy recipes – a bag of Dynamite Baits Amino Original groundbait mixed into a soft paste is all you need, it’s worth noting that the stiffer the paste mix is, the less bites I tend to get, the softer you can fish it according to the conditions the better.
This is transported out to the swim via a pole mounted Flexi Pot as shipping it out normally would be impossible.
When mixing the paste, and touching on visibility again, I like to boost the mix and give it an even stronger smell by adding some of the matching Dynamite Amino Pellet Soak, this is a strong fishmeal flavour which is going to increase my chances of a quicker bite by tapping into the carp’s sense of smell rather than sight.
For feed – I like to feed 4mm and 6mm pellets, these are slightly larger, which ensures the fish don’t have to dig around too much for them.
Micro pellets are great for getting fish into the swim but on a venue where bubbles can be a problem, you can make it worse, so keep these for the margins only!
Rigging Up!
This won’t take long… paste rigs are as easy as it gets, on venues where the water is quite shallow like it is at Puddledock, I like to use a simple rig with no shot down the line, using the weight of the paste to cock the float.
To achieve this, just plumb up at dead depth until you see just the bristle of the float and the float will sit perfectly. This is set up on 0.19mm to 0.17mm MAP Optimum Power, a long bristled 4x12 paste float and a size 12 B911 hook.
Elastic wise, I’m expecting to catch big weights of 150lb+ on this venue, so the last thing I want to do is be playing the fish for too long so a 12-16 TKS Twin Core Hollow is the perfect choice.
Rotate Your Lines!
On venues where you get plenty of bubbling it is common to get a run of bites soon after feeding but after an initial burst of action, the bubbles continue but bites cease!
If this happens it is usually because the fish have turned the bottom over and don’t want to feed in that area or in extreme cases, they cannot find the hook bait in the cloud created.
If this happens, all I do is simply pop the plummet on and find another spot to the left or right in the same depth and start again. By doing this, you can catch another burst of fish from a fresh area of the peg.
I’d be comfortable doing this several times in a session or match, but it’s important to not feed the lines you’ve fished again so they settle down to give you somewhere to go back to later in the day.
The Session
After plumbing up at around 5 metres in 4ft of water, my initial feed was placed into the pot – to start with I feed just a handful of 4mm pellets to gauge the response, just enough to get a bite.
Selecting a piece of paste from the pot, this is simply squashed with my thumb, the hook placed in the middle and it’s then folded over, no moulding perfect shapes and straight into the pole mounted pot to be shipped out to the fed area.
Immediately after feeding a few bubbles started to appear which gave me confidence that a few fish were in the area and bites likely.
The float cocked under the weight of the paste and with a few knocks immediately registering on the float bristle, it wasn’t going to be long!
Anglers often struggle with hitting bites on paste, but what you want to do is ignore all the dips and wait for two or three really sharp jags on the tip before it fly’s under at 100mph!
By selecting this type of bite, you’ll be striking at a proper indication eight out of ten times, but it's important not to get frustrated with the constant shipping in and out to rebait, this is constantly attracting fish into the swim and the hook bait also acts as feed too, so it’s never time wasted!
Soon after dropping in, I was catching fish – lots of fish! – by getting into a nice rhythm of shipping out, dropping the paste in, hooking a fish and then feeding a few pellets by hand while I was playing the fish, I could line my next bite up.
With carp between 2 and 8lb coming to my net regularly, I soon had a lull in the action and had to put the plummet on to start a new line off to the right. Straight away after potting in a few pellets along with a few pieces of paste, I dropped in hopeful of another run of bites.
It wasn’t long before the fish found my new spot, and with the bottom in better condition than my original line, it was like starting the session all over again with a bite a chuck action from carp of all sizes.
It had been an excellent session and with well over 120lb of carp caught in just three hours, it had proven what an excellent bait paste can be on venues where soft lake beds and silt can be problematic and getting bites on other baits can leave you frustrated.
Not only is it a big bait, its super soft too, so when the fish are filter feeding in silt for any larger items, the paste naturally ends up in their mouths and its game on! Before the summer ends, make sure you get out on the bank and give this devastating tactic a try.
