Winter carping at Lindholme

Winter carp fishing can be very different from the pile it in approach that can be very successful in the warmer months when the carp are gorging on food. Small baits such as maggots and casters and delicate presentation come to the fore while big positive baits like meat and corn on tackle you could land a speed boat on take a back seat. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the many snake type lakes, packed with hard fighting F1’s that are springing up all around the country.

We joined former England International angler Paul Yates at the new Oasis lake at Lindholme Fishery for a run down on his approach to successful winter carping.

Tactics
“It is often said that feeding is the key to successful angling and in no other form of fishing is this truer than when targeting winter carp and F1’s on venues like this one. It doesn’t matter how good your pole is, what float, line or hook you are using or how well you are presenting your bait the fact is that if you don’t have feeding fish in front of you you can’t catch them and feeding is the only way to get and perhaps more importantly keep fish feeding in your peg. If you put too much feed in you might have hundreds of fish in your peg but they won’t be feeding and if you don’t put enough feed in why would the fish stay in your peg. Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as to say, for example, feed 6 or 12 maggots every put in or for every bite because it is different every day. On some days half a pint of maggots is way too much for a match while on others you’ll be through two pints in the fourth hour. All the anglers who are regularly successful here read the conditions quickly and adapt their feeding to suit the conditions on the day. How to make the right decision on the day is perhaps the hardest thing in fishing and sometimes I wonder whether it is an instinctive thing rather than something that can be taught.”

“However having read all that don’t give up hope because there is a way to approach winter carping that will give you the best chance of making the most of your peg. I might not be able to show you how to be Will Raison but hopefully I will be able to help you put more fish in the net on a regular basis and the secret brings us back to yet another often quoted angling truism – ‘you can always put some more in but you can never take it out again’. If you keep that saying in mind every time you put your hand in your bait box you will be well on your way to mastering winter carping with maggots or casters.”

Tackling up
“On most snake lakes, and this one is no exception, the majority of the fish are going to be somewhere on the far ledge. They might be in the deepest water at the bottom of the far shelf, in the shallowest water inches from the far bank grass or anywhere in between. Wherever they are though they will be where they want to be and that is where you have to fish. If the fish want to feed in three feet of water there is no point in trying to catch them in five feet or in a foot. Find where the fish want to feed and fish there rather than trying to make them feed where you want them to. A great advantage of fishing the same venue on a regular basis is that you get to know these important details so know exactly where to fish from the start, you don’t have to waste time finding out and in match fishing on this type of water starting right is vitally important. It is difficult to catch up if you are an hour behind before you even start.”

“I know from the last few matches that the bulk of the winning bags have been caught between 2 and 3 feet deep so that is where I will start off. I’ll set one float to 3ft deep and another to 2ft and plumb up to find the range I’ll have to fish at each depth and mark it on the butt of the pole. I’m currently using Preston Classic 10 floats for my far bank work but any good float will do so long as it sits right and is stable in the conditions and today because there is not too much wind 0.3g will be right. I like to use a strung out shotting pattern in the winter with size 10 and 11 shot as I believe a lot of fish watch the bait down and take as it is falling through or just after it lands. With regards to line I always fish as fine as I feel I can get away with in the winter. I know people talk about fishing 0.14 direct all through the year but I feel I’ll get more bites fishing finer so use 0.12 main line and a 0.10 hook length and I like the Kamasan B510 hook pattern for winter maggot fishing as it is a light hook that doesn’t impair bait presentation too much.”

“I’ll also set a rig up to fish a margin line which is set up and shotted exactly the same except that I use a 4×12 Drennan Tuff Eye float instead of the Preston Classic 10 and again with this rig I’m looking for three foot or so of depth which in this peg is about a two metres from the bank. It is not always a productive line but can pay dividends late on in a match and can make the difference between a pick up and just missing out.”

The session
“Because the weather is reasonably mild and the match weights have been good recently I know the fish are feeding reasonably well so I don’t have to be too cautious today and am going to start by cupping in about 20 – 30 maggots into my 3ft deep swim. If it were really cold and clear I might start with just half a dozen maggots and feed to my bites but being too negative can be as much of a sin in match fishing as being too positive and I feel the fish will feed today. I don’t like feeding lots of lines at once here as I feel it can become confusing both to me and to the fish so I try to concentrate on a single line at a time and other than a few casters loose fed into my margin line that is it until I get going and see how the fish are responding.”

Line bites straight away are a sign that there are fish in the swim and feeding and it isn’t long before the first F1 of the day is on its way into the keep net. Instead of striking at bites Paul simply lifts the float out of the water six inches at every indication. This is plenty enough to set a sharp hook, avoids foul hooking and spooking fish and keeps the bait working in the swim with fish often taking the maggot properly immediately after he has gently lifted at a liner.

Using his little and often feeding plan Paul is putting just 10 to 15 maggots at a time into his kinder egg pole cup and feeding them as soon as he ships out and catching carp steadily. However as the day goes on he showed us another feeding method that he has found very productive at Lindholme which basically consists of kinder egg pots with different width slots in the bottom which the maggots can crawl through and instead of tipping the contents of the cup out he simply lets the maggots crawl out on their own resulting in a steady drip-drip of maggots into the swim. By using a wider slot he can feed a quick trickle into the swim and with a narrower slot just one at a time. A deadly method that along with his strung out shotting pattern saw plenty of carp landed.

After an hour and a half or so Paul decided to have a look at the 2ft line just to see if the stamp of fish was any better in the shallower water, which he explained was often the case, and to see if the catch rate was any quicker. Despite not having fed the line at all bites are instant and in less than ten minutes another three F1’s are added to the rapidly growing shoal in Paul’s keep net. However after fifteen minutes or so it is apparent that although he is catching on the line there are not as many fish in the shallower water as there are in the 3ft deep line. The number of liners is noticeably less and importantly the stamp of fish is no better than the deeper line.

“You have to keep a close check on the amount of weight you are actually putting into your net from each line when making a decision about whether to change. It is very easy to waste time trying different things out and all of a sudden without realising it you are half an hour behind. The three foot deep line has definitely got more fish on it today and I am catching quicker on it than I am on the two foot line but I still think I could catch quicker so I am going to start a new 3ft line a couple of metres to the right of my starting position and feed it slightly differently to try and speed things up a bit.”

With a plummet Paul quickly finds another spot exactly the same depth as his starting line, very important so that he can swap between the two without changing depth, and adds another mark to the butt of his pole. His plan is to feed maggots on the deck rather than drip them through to try and get the fish to get their heads down and feed more confidently with hopefully fewer liners. To try and achieve this he feeds 20 to 30 maggots at a time on this line but tips them straight into the swim rather than let them drip through his pot. Importantly though he carries on feeding his original line just as before to ensure he can continue catching even if the new line fails.

Margin Line
The new line doesn’t fail but doesn’t improve his catch rate significantly however by rotating around his three lines Paul keeps plopping carp into his net until going into the fifth hour he estimates he must have “well over 40 pounds”. In the last hour he decides to have a look at his margin line which he has been loose feeding with casters all day long. “Because you haven’t been fishing the margin line it can be very difficult to know how often to feed it. I simply feed it every time I catch a fish across so if they’re feeding well I’ll be feeding more but if the fishing is hard I’ll feed less. It is not a foolproof system but it seems to work for me.”

Paul’s last hour proved to be the most productive of our session with a much better stamp of fish coming to his loose feed and more than 20lb of fish, including some better mirrors, falling to his single caster hook bait. With the fish feeding positively Paul finished the session feeding 20 to 30 casters a couple of times a put in as that last hour progressed and it almost seemed the more he put in the quicker the fish came.

By being careful with his feeding and working a total of four different lines throughout Paul finished our five hour session with a more than respectable seventy-pound plus bag of F1’s and carp on a dour winter day at Lindholme to show how good winter carping can be with a bit of thought about and refinement to your approach.