Successful winter fishing

The cold was upon us once again and the banks were a lot quieter than usual, but with Jack Frost in the air some of us more brave anglers set out to cash in on the absence of others. I have to be honest though, fishing through early December was very unproductive and gave my confidence a serious battering, so I can see why a lot of people decide to stop in bed.

For the winter me and my mate chief had been sticking to the shallowest of our local pools and doing what most other carpers do during the winter, namely, using single hi attract pop-ups with minimal amounts of freebees. We must have tried every colour, flavour and size with no effect.

Christmas and New Year came and went as fast as it always does when you’re off work and generally the weather wasn’t too bad. So as normal we would go fishing on a Saturday. With the lack of success during December I had to go for a different approach. I arrived as normal on a very cold and misty morning with little hope of catching anything. As we trod through the mud round to the most likely productive area, I couldn’t decide how or where to fish. After a quick set up it was time to get a bait in the water and the kettle on, so instead of the light approach I decided to go heavy approach with the bait and spread 25 boilies or so over the chosen swim and cast a single 15mm boilie to the spot, in the summer I would use double the amount. What I would also do is attach a nugget of pva to mask the hook point from any debris or leaf litter. This would also show me exactly where my hook bait is so that I could fire 5 more boilies over the same area. I decided that I would use the other rod to rove around a little bit. With this I was to use a 10mm green pop-up and a minute bag of pellets. This was cast into open water and the traps were set.

The kettle had boiled and a cup of tea was half empty before I was staring at the rods in disbelief. The heavy baiting had paid off! I was fishing in the coldest of conditions but still there were carp happily feeding. As if this wasn’t good enough I continued the run of success with a fish coming almost every hour. The fish couldn’t seem to get enough of the boilies and in pure amazement I managed to bank 7 fish up to 12 pound. Scott on the other hand hadn’t had a bite. And the fact that I had all these on one rod suggests there might be a congregation of fish at that exact location – I have no other explanation for it.

I had been using Winter Bait from Nutrabaits as a hook bait and feed. Whilst the hooklink was made up of Korda’s combilink coated braid (weedygreen).

The Rig...

To Make: Firstly take a length of coated braid and create a loop at one end that will be of around an inch in length when stretched out. The take a hook like a Deceptor or stiff link hook (the ones with the eyes bent the opposite direction to the norm) and push the loop through so that it comes out of the back of the hook, then thread on a rig ring, and finally to attach the hook put the loop over the hook and pull down a little so that the loop cannot go back over the hook. I then strip back the coating from the loop knot about 3 inches and at this point I add a bb shot weight and some rig putty for camo. I finish this off with what I call a twisted figure of eight knot and the rig is complete.

Slack lines

Burnsy