The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

Vole wrote:Wheat - Cheap and wonderful, but it can fill them up a bit. Just wheat from the pet-food store (in ememrgencies, health-food shops sell it as "Wheat Berry" (idiots) at about five times the price (hmm, maybe not that stupid...).
Soak it for 24 hours.
Drain it, cover the container with a damp cloth and leave it for another 24 hours.
Transfer to water and boil till some of the grains split their little brown jackets and the others are cooked but still al dente. Try both sorts for hookbait.
Taditionally, gilt hooks were used, but it hardly matters at night, and I don't know of a decent gilt hook at the mo.
The boiling-water can be used to make up the groundbait, if used - bread and bran, natch!
Try it on your local roach first, if time permits, to get confident with it.

Santiago wrote:Try using wet bread. If you're not sure what it is then refer to LA Parker's book, 'How to Catch Them, Roach '. But you can't cast wet bread easily, so you'll be restricted to margin fishing. It's wet crust from a cottage loaf, if memory serves, and pre-soaked for several hours before hooking and it's rather delicate, but bites are extremely confident. I tried it this summer and hit every bite. Otherwise, try a longer hooklink with normal bread flake.

Vole wrote:Wheat - Cheap and wonderful, but it can fill them up a bit. Just wheat from the pet-food store (in ememrgencies, health-food shops sell it as "Wheat Berry" (idiots) at about five times the price (hmm, maybe not that stupid...).
Soak it for 24 hours.
Drain it, cover the container with a damp cloth and leave it for another 24 hours.
Transfer to water and boil till some of the grains split their little brown jackets and the others are cooked but still al dente. Try both sorts for hookbait.
Taditionally, gilt hooks were used, but it hardly matters at night, and I don't know of a decent gilt hook at the mo.
The boiling-water can be used to make up the groundbait, if used - bread and bran, natch!
Try it on your local roach first, if time permits, to get confident with it.

Santiago wrote:Then try using a longer hooklink if you're missing bites! They can be finicky with fresh flake and need longer to take the hook /bait into their mouths, especially if there is competition for the bait. Parker watched roach feed using an underwater telescope (1940's) and observed them swimming away from the shoal with bread just held in their lips, before swallowing some feet away from whence they picked the flake up. A longer hooklink gives them more time and distance to suck the flake into their mouths. With a short hooklink they feel resistance too early and spit out the bait. Anyways, best of luck.

Vole wrote:If you use the unsplit grains, they should stay on ok. The strength is all in the outer coating, so nick them on almost like maggots. They should have a sort of firm, bursting crunch to them, like a chip in a leather jacket, the inside translucent grey,with no uncooked, white bit in the middle.
They can spin a bit on the retrieve, so a few experiments with differently-hooked seeds or pairs/groups of seeds could be useful, just dragged through the water under the rod-tip to see what works - or, of course, a tiny swivel on the cast.

Kevin wrote:The Anglers I read about last year on the Lough,were using a bait and wait approach baiting up swims with Wheat through a spod or a spomb,sorry I cant remember what hook bait they were using but I think it took a couple of days to get the fish over the feed.