The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

Fatty gets a 10 kilo bag Skrettin 6mm pellets that lasts most of the year for a tenner.

You don't need to fill the water in like some idiots do......just ping the baits at yer float. Use about six pellets per cast.

So a tenner for a years bait. Not too bad, with even the tightest amongst you cheapskates able to afford them.

Honestly if you lot get any tighter you'll have trouble walking in a straight line.

As ever,...

Moley

But we need to save our money for important things like pies

Moley wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 6:29 pm Fatty gets a 10 kilo bag Skrettin 6mm pellets that lasts most of the year for a tenner.

You don't need to fill the water in like some idiots do......just ping the baits at yer float. Use about six pellets per cast.

So a tenner for a years bait. Not too bad, with even the tightest amongst you cheapskates able to afford them.

Honestly if you lot get any tighter you'll have trouble walking in a straight line.

As ever,...

Moley

I'm not sure if it's being mean or just bait snobbery. I used to catch roach on silkweed, not because it was cheap but because it was what they were eating. I've fished with boilies a lot because they help to avoid nuisance fish and I know it will still be fishing hours after I cast it. Fish will eat almost anything that is edible to us and a vast amount of other stuff. Stick something on yer hook and get on with it.

Mind you, nothing I put on my hook this evening attracted so much as a sniff from anything scaley.

A catering tin of sweetcorn is good! Or any other beans or pulses. A walk along the bank or around the lake with a small amount in each swim does give the fish a chance to taste/eat them. Hence this is what is done with boilies - J feeds with 18mm strawberry boilies - M is walking around the opposite way with squid and octopus flavoured 12mm boilies - that is at 8pm. Next morning at 6am with dumbbells (oval boilies) 20mm flavoured with XYZ - (a secret flavour of 2 or three mixed meat & fish flavours) are being sprayed in every swim by B!
No wonder the fish get confused - " bread I have always enjoyed that!"

After Derek Stritton fished the Eagle Pond , us lads would search the margins looking for discarded bait and the " secret" catching element.

Of course we now know , the " secret" often wasnt the bait!

Troydog wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 12:39 pm Thank you Aitch, a very encouraging reply. My worms are free and so is the bread crumb. Corn costs just 39p a can in the supermarket, so I scoot past all those expensive looking plastic packs on the shelf of the tackle shops…..

And dont forget the bacon grill, its cheap as well

Troydog wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 11:06 am In Hereford we are blessed with two excellent fishing tackle shops that, between them, can supply just about anything that the coarse fisher could want. There are shelves and shelves of boilies and pellets, with many exotic flavours and colours to choose from. These baits also claim to be highly nutritious.
My question is: if these baits are being widely used, both before, during and after sessions on a stillwater, is an angler who uses just bread, maggots or corn, for example, at a serious disadvantage? I mean do tench become so preoccupied with these modern baits that you really need to join the boilie blitz to compete?

I think that fish don't treat little round balls with suspicion anymore ,I think that they have been around for so long now and in such vast quantities that they see them as natural,I always use either sweetcorn or bacon grill or bread or dead/alive maggots,recently I have used halibut pellets and trout pellets oh and I forgot tigers,last week I found some popups in my bag and put one on and low and behold I had a carp,was that just coincidence

Great stuff guys and very funny too. I’m off to work now, so I can’t try any of these tricks til later in the week !!

Ten years ago my pal Mark and I had a few clandestine sessions on a fabulous private estate lake in South Wales. Naughty I know but the temptation of some cracking Tench was too much! Anyway this lake hadn't been fished properly since the early Seventies so I thought my usual big bait strong gear approach would work? Not so, those Tench, and they averaged over four pounds, were unbelievably picky. We fished off the dam into eleven foot of water just beyond a fringe of lilys and as dusk approached there would be huge sheets of bubbles many yards square but a big bait was completely ignored. The best bait, I kid you not- a six MM expander pellet. This was pointed up on our second visit when two hours in Mark had six fish to six pounds I had one three pounder and hadn't had a touch for ages. I scrounged a few pellets off Mark and unbelievably the float buried first chuck and a five pounder was mine! Another followed soon after with a biggish Eel taking the last pellet. The only time I out fished Mark there was a morning session when I had turned a pint of casters. Then I only beat him by one, a combined catch of seventeen Tench. Not long after we were rumbled and that was the end of it

While I have caught on boilies and pellets (carp, tench, bream and eels) I usually do better on things like spam and corn.

It could be because my rig making for optimal presentation of boilies is very inexpert!