Top four chub baits
Are struggling to find the right bait for your chub fishing? Well we may have the answers for you here are the top five chub baits that you can use on the rivers this season that will potentially land you your best chub.
More big bags of chub are caught in summer on casters and hemp than any other bait. Hemp sinks quickly, while casters sink at different speeds, depending on how light or dark they are. Feed is therefore spread over a long length of the swim. Casters tipped with a maggot stay on the hook better than casters alone, and such hookbaits are very robust – important when you’re running the float down the swim up to 40 yards away. To store casters, you need a fridge and an airtight container with a layer of polythene between the tin and lid. Give them a little air every day to stop them suffocating. This is a much better way than keeping them in plastic bags.
If small fish aren’t a problem, a bucket of maggots can be just as deadly as casters and hemp for chub on certain summer days. To get the best from maggots, find a good tackle shop that has a reliable supply of quality bait on a regular basis.
If you can’t find anywhere locally there is an option to buy maggots (and casters) online now. There are at least a couple of mail order companies who can supply you with what you need. However you buy the maggots, always ensure you look after it properly when you’ve got it.
This means that you need an old fridge to keep the maggots chilled right down to just above freezing point in order to stop them from turning and shrinking. Always use a cold bag with ice packs to transport the bait to your chosen river swim and, once you’re there, keep them cool and out of direct sunlight.
Bread is a fantastic bait to use with groundbait containing casters and hemp. It’s also good on its own early weeks in the season.
Use a big hook, anything from a size 10 up to a size 6, and wrap small pieces of sliced white bread around the shank. Use a top and bottom attached float with plenty of weight about 1ft above the hook and, in the early stages of a session, every time you run the rig down, strike the bread off at different points in the swim.
This will eventually result in plenty of tempting bits of bread bouncing through the swim, which will soon attract a shoal of hungry chub.
Few things are more annoying than small dace and bleak intercepting maggot and caster feed and hookbaits. The answer lies in bags of 6mm and 8mm fishmeal carp pellets – the light coloured Bait-Tech brand is a good one. Try these and your fishing should improve dramatically.
Pellets are a really easy bait to use – you just feed mostly 6mm offerings with a few 8mm samples, then use a banded or lassoed 8mm pellet as hookbait. It can often pay to scale this approach down on small rivers and feed 4mm pellets while using a 6mm sample on the hook.
The beauty of carp pellets as a chub bait is that they are quite cheap for the volume you get and you don’t need loads to catch a big weight.
