Groundbait - part the second

[Guest]

Dearly beloved, today’s sermon considers groundbait in it’s other guise ie putting freebies around your hookbait to trap the little darlings. Now let it be known that it is not always necessary to do so – for example a highly flavoured and visible bait ( such as a boilie ) on it’s own can do the job as effectively, and it’s a good system to use in colder months when the fish have reduced appetites. However I always feel, that much happier, especially in the warmer months, if I know there’s something out there attracting the fish that might fool them into picking up the hookbait. So how do we in the UK do this?

Setting out your stall

Obviously you want some free offerings around your hookbait – the idea being that carp will see food, munch on what you’ve kindly put in and become more confident and competitive in their feeding until whoops – they pick up your bait. The question now is a) what to put in how to get it there and c) how much to put in. Obviously the first choice is to put in what you’ve got on the hook. However it need not end there. Sometimes putting in high attractor baits such as pellets and using, say, a boilie on it’s own can work just as well – the pellets break down and work like groundbait and the fish pick up your boilie as well. After all, you don’t just have one food item on your plate at home. In just the same way you can use a number of different free offerings ( an approach I prefer ) – for example a mix of corn, hemp seeds, a few boilies and small trout pellets. This way the fish are less likely to see your hookbait as something different and dangerous, and having more items to chose from means they’re more likely to make a mistake. It also means that if one hookbait isn’t being taken you can change to another more easily – say from a boilie to corn in my example. Try and make sure there is something there to put out a nice smell – groundbait works the same way as you walking past somewhere cooking food- you might not be out looking for food but “ooohhh that smell – I could do with a burger!” Carp are not only possessed of a sense of smell many, many times more sensitive than our own they are also by nature curious and will try and eat anything . I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been surface fishing and had carp try to eat my float instead of the bait.

How to get it out there

Obviously for close in fishing just throw it in by hand! To get extra range use a slingshot – just get on with a nice, big pouch and ping! To get the best results load one up just before you cast – that way when your rig hits the water quickly put the rod down and you’ve got a nice pool of ripples to aim for. Another thing used here is a throwing stick. Essentially a 2-3ft hollow plastic tube that is gradually curved towards the end. Put your boilies in the tube and using an overarm flick you can send boilies out an incredible distance. More often used here is the mighty ‘Spod’. Spodding is practised the land throughout and a great way to build up a bed of loose feed at long distance. A Spod is a hollow piece of plastic about 8inches ( sizes do vary )shaped like a rocket ( for aerodynamic reasons for casting). The pointy end is filled with foam or some other buoyant material. The end with the fins is open ended and attached at this end to a mainline using some short lengths of stretchy line and a swivel. Simply fill the spod with, say, pellets and cast out. When the spod hits the water, the combination of the weight of the feed and the buoyancy of the nose-cone tips the spod up in the water releasing the feed down and out of the open end. Simply reel in to recover and repeat – it’s obvious practise to use the line clip method I talked about in my last piece to hit the same spot. Because of the weight of a spod its best to use a strong rod and line set-up – in the UK there are specific ‘spod rods’ of a usual 4lb test curve available, but really any strong rod will do. Simple and effective, although you do have to allow for currents effecting where the feed will end up sometimes. Its best to ‘spod’ at the beginning of a session as it does create quite a disturbance.

PVA string and bags

Now I’ve no idea if this is available in the USA, but if it isn’t then try and get some from a UK dealer because once you’ve used it you’ll wonder how you managed without it. PVA is basically a plastic that gradually completely dissolves in water ( so no environmental issues here ). It can be tricky stuff to handle – you have to insure that everything it touches has no trace of water on it, although it will not dissolve if it comes into contact with oils or grease. Hands must be completely dry. Now its uses are many – it comes in string form or as small plastic bags. PVA string is terrific stuff – using a bait needle or splicing needle you can thread it through several boilies or pieces of meat to make a ‘stringer’. Just tie the stringer to your hook and cast out – the string takes a few minutes to dissolve so that when your hookbait and stringer hit the bottom, the string dissolves and leaves a few free offerings just inches from your hookbait – neat eh? You can use the bags in a similar way. Sizes vary – I use bags from 4 – 8 inches long depending on circumstances. Put your hookbait ( on a short leader - I use 4 inches of leader on this method with an inline lead weight sinker just above the leader swivel ) at the bottom of the bag, fill the bag with your free offerings ( I use pellets and broken boilies with a boilie on the hook ) about two thirds full. Now put the lead weight sinker in the bag on top of or in the free offerings and wrap the bag tightly around the mainline – I secure it using a short piece of PVA string ( note – make sure your sinker and leader is completely dry as well. ) Make sure the bag is nice and tightly packed, and pierce the gag with a needle. The problem you sometimes get is that the bag has air in it and, when cast out, will just sit on the surface and dissolve. Use a good sized weight ( at least 85g ) to help sink the bag and piercing holes will also prevent the bag becoming too buoyant. The bags I use are effective in depths of about 15ft – any deeper and the bags tend to dissolve before they hit the bottom. Be careful casting – you’ve probably got 4oz or more with the combined weight of the bag’s contents and the lead – use a slow steady cast to get it out there. Ideally you want the bag to sink on contact and hit the bottom before dissolving, so that you have a nice neat pile of food. You can put anything in these bags that is not in some way connected with water or juices. You can put corn in them, but make sure they are dry first because even a tiny amount of water or juice will wreck a bag. Anything like corn I would recommend putting in a dry powder ( milk powder is good – it will create a cloud in the water ) when using PVA. There are many uses for PVA that I will come back to in the future.

How much?

A question that is the matter of some debate here. There is a school of thought that if you’re putting in groundbait and the water level of the lake doesn’t rise you haven’t used enough. Now we’re talking here about as much as 40kg of bait! Now I’m not saying you need to put this much in – certainly I know some anglers here get through 20 kg or more of bait and they get results. Personally I can’t afford that kind of money! Usually I find anything up to 10kg reasonable in spring or summer , and most of that will be cheap particle baits ( hemp and corn ) with a couple of bags of pellets. Come winter I cut right back to less than a couple of kilos, if that. Big beds of bait can be effective, however if you do put too much in a) the carp may not find your bait or overfeed on free offerings and once it’s in you can’t get it out again! There are those who will argue otherwise though – it’s a free country! Also it depends on population. If there are a lot of carp then bait up heavily – the competive feeding that will follow will lead to captures. The only rule is that there are no rules.

Phew! I hope that helps – I’ve been by no means as comprehensive as I’d like - you could write a book on this and still miss bits out. Any stuff that springs to mind I’ll let you know.

Right, I'm off to practise what I preach - carp here I come
Cheers
Steve