In praise of the worm...

[Santiago]

Possibly the best all round natural bait. On the Thames a legered lob worm at night tends to select the bigger fish.

[Snape]

I really like Graeme Pullen's videos.

A good one on fishing with worms...

https://youtu.be/tzgPdYkAxqE

[Beryl]

My only worry is if you ledger ( my favourite method) they will bury themselves. If I was a worm that would be a no -brainer. I still have a problem fishing off the bottom unless on the drop. Once it's dropped to max depth it looks not too natural to me like its levitating or something? But I'm not a fish. I'd love to try sweetcorn that can dance....

[Beryl]

This is about a flooded clay pit in Cornwall that has been stocked at some point many years ago then left to its own devices. I've been fishing one swim for a month now, on average three days a week for 3/4 hours to include dusk and an hour into darkness now and again. Most days I sling a couple of loaves of bread in with various attractors, chopped sprats/maggots/hemp and the water it cooked in etc etc. So I feed it but don't always fish it. After many blanks I've now had three days with four to six perch upto near two pounds ( full of spawn)

I fish two rods on the tip ledger. One has always been worm. The other is meat/ prawn cooked/uncooked/ maggot within a few feet. The worm setup has always got the most interest from the early days when bites were hard to find so has to be the control.

Oddly, the other guy that fishes the lake for other than carp was fishing yesterday. He has fished it for years and was fishing maggot. He got one small fish whilst I lost two biggies in snags and landed two to over a pound, all on worm.

Today I caught six perch. Again all on worm despite offering cooked prawn and some smoked sausage meat within a foot or too.

Im most perplexed about the refusal to eat maggot. It's juicy and wiggles? They die quicker in water than a worm but I only had one today and that was added to stop the worm getting off the hook

[AshbyCut]

Those who have fished with me will probably be yawning now ... but I still adhere to Old Izaak's advocacy of 'scour worms in fennel' to the extent that I grow the herb in my garden and keep my worms in the fresh plant for at least 3 days (chopped stalks, leaves and flowers in season, and collect the seed from flower heads, much to the annoyance of the chaffinches) for use in the less clement months. Is it coincidence that my PB on cane perch, tench, crucian, gudgeon, roach, bream, and carp (ok ... I know I only fish for tiddlers !!!) have been taken on this bait ???

[Beryl]

I'll try that! I've a fennel plant that gets to six foot every year. My wormery has a few small worms in it so hoping they are going to shag themselves into a self perpetuating community. Got some leaf mould and moss off the trees and added a tenner worth of DB's to the mix. It's still will they or won't they. I add some zapped food waste and a bit of the ' Independent' each week but they don't seem too hungry.....