Bait Box Blues

It's occurred to me lately that I tend to use very few baits for my fishing sticking with those that I know and trust will catch the fish I'm after, so for roach it's bread and sometimes worms, pike and zander slices of roach and trout, barbel would be meat most of the year and corn in high summer, and so on and so forth. With utter confidence in the bait I'll happily sit there till the inevitable happens without chopping and changing to attract bites if they aren't coming. If it worked then — it'll work now, is my motto.

This leads to a blinkered view of what other baits are capable of though. Fishing bread isn't always the best way to catch roach for instance, and that was clear on the Itchen last summer when the river was high. Bread gained the most infuriating bites and hours later I turned to my box of maggots for an answer. I wanted to conserve my two pint stocks for trotting next day when I'd need every last one just to maintain the swim but filled a maggot feeder anyhow and cast out...

Bang! The tip arched over violently and a roach was hooked. Again — whack — another. I don't remember ever having such bites. They were unmissable! The humble grub transformed my fortunes, bread was abandoned, and to my relief I found that feeding wasn't necessary — on the day maggot was king.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that the stretch I fished that Saturday morning would be fed with gallons of maggots by the end of the weekend, that being the local method — feed and feed and feed whilst trotting through at breakneck speed. What I'd also failed to apprehend was how many maggots I'd need next day just to stay in the game — Simon Daley, my guide for those sessions, didn't have a measly two pints, he'd a bucketload by his side both days and used the lot...

Maggots were their staple diet!

Simon pulls a bulging net of roach caught by feeding a bucket of maggots

Of course I've found the reverse to be true so many times, bread outclassing maggots by a huge margin and bringing the largest specimens, that often I won't take a change bait along thinking such insurance unnecessary. The same can be said for many target species — canal tench adore sweetcorn and everywhere I've fished for them I've found crucians love prawns — so I don't bother overmuch with alternative baits.

Marsh Farm: a bucket full of various baits but only the prawns worked

But perhaps I should in future because the only way I found that crucians have a taste for prawn was when fishing for tench with caster in a swim fizzing with bubbles. Having a hard time despite the obvious activity out front I grabbed a prawn out of my sandwich and tried that in desperation. I didn't catch any tench though — crucians occupying the same swim that I hadn't a clue were there before I stuck a prawn on the hook ate my sandwich filling in less than an hour!

Remembering that episode and the following spring when Marsh Farm crucians & tench both took prawn baits with gusto but ignored every other I'd taken along, it occurred to me that I really should experiment more than I do. Like I used to in fact before I got entrenched in what have been good, but might now be stale habits.

I decided to make a chart of my bait usage down the years with estimates in shades of blue of the quantities of fish caught on those I've used including a few that I've tried once or twice but never persisted with — shellfish for instance, or the fly. It makes it plain that certain baits reign supreme even though I use them far less than others, maggots of course catching the most species and the most fish. Conversely, bread, because I use it so very often, has caught more species than it probably should have considering I use it only for roach and silver bream, everything else being a by-catch, including pike!

Would small pieces of fish catch roach? I don't know. Would hemp catch Silver bream? Haven't a clue. Can I catch pike on sweetcorn? If it catches trout and salmon, then why ever not?

There's everything to gain by it and nothing to lose. I think I might even discover something new. So for the season ahead I'm going to break the mould, try out different baits and attempt to turn the whole chart blue!