![]() Back to Woodies and I decided on the same area where I had been enjoying great catches fishing shallow. ![]() After testing the various gauges of line at home, I was happy with the diameter and breaking strain ratios, so I loaded up my feeder reels. They are part of the massive Rapala group, who I have done a lot of work for in recent years. Sufix asked me to test out some new feeder mono. “Feed and then cast over it,” he kept saying, as he latched into yet another shallow cruising chub. Jan Porter also taught me a brilliant way of gaining more positive bites when we did a feature many years ago on the River Derwent at Borrowash. One is to have floats like mine that self-cock fast, which combine perfectly with bait fed on the little and often principle. It’s not unusual to miss loads of bites when fishing shallow, but there are tricks that can change that. They are never easy to catch up in the water, but often provide action when nothing else is happening on conventional tactics. I also suspect big roach and hybrids, in particular, learn that it’s much safer to feed well away from the bottom. It seems most people present their tackle on the deck and completely miss beauties like this. What amazes me about the fish I catch shallow, no matter how heavily pressured the venue, is how fin and scale-perfect most of them are. ![]() They continue to perform exceptionally well now I’m in the Midlands. They also worked wonders when I moved North and frequented the deep reservoirs near Hexham. These floats came about when I used to fish Gloucester Park Lake in Basildon, where the big roach only showed if you fished shallow. The original wire stems bent out of shape too easily, so I later replaced them with titanium wire, which always stays straight. I carefully whittled the bulbous bodies down until they were like mini-pencils in shape, sanding them further until the floats self-cocked and only took a tiny amount of weight. They are over 20 years old, having starting life as body-down designs with long wire stems and super-sensitive fibre tips. The floats I use for this type of fishing are ones I’ve modified, because there isn’t anything on the market that suits my needs. I switched to an even lighter rig, set 3ft deep with just 3 spread number 13 micro shot down the line. Lots of fast bites resulted, but only a few were converted. Sometimes the fish respond on the drop, while on other occasions suspended hook baits work well. I fish this with spread-out number 11s, holding the tackle on a tight line as it settles, which quickly sorts out the best setting for bites. I tried mid-depth first, with a 4×12 bodied float, an old Milo model with a sensitive fibre tip and carbon stem. It’s just a case of finding how far down silver fish want to be when intercepting your feed, which in this case was to be slow-sinking casters. I’ve discovered once a swim has been loose fed for a while, shallow pole rigs score surprisingly well. Although it was possible to get bites in this deep venue fishing on the bottom, that was slow going. I began the month with a few sessions on the Specimen Lake at Woodland Waters, where the huge shoals of silver fish were at last waking up, much later in the year than normal.
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