Adam Wakelin's way with winter skimmers

Winter feederfishing for bream can so often revolve around tiny little changes making a big difference and nowhere more so is this true than in the distance you fish at.
Plug away on one line and you will catch to begin with but when the bites die off, too many anglers keep at it more in hope than anything else that the bream will return. The truth is that they rarely do but nor is it the case that they have stopped feeding. Very often, the fish will simply have moved a few yards further out or even closer to the bank.
This can be down to clarity of the water and the pressure that’s being put on the fish when a few of their mates get caught but when the tip stops moving, don’t just sit there. Wind in, take a few turns off the reel or add a few and get back in. The change is often immediate!
The Main Lake at Barston Lakes is a typical example of this change. I’ve fished plenty of matches when the bites have stopped and you have to follow those bream around. It’s common at Barston for the bream to move closer onto a long pole line that pole anglers commonly fish and you almost need to have two separate lines on the go at once, allowing you to chop and change.

The right distance
To kick off with and provided the water has a bit of colour in it, I will begin fishing at around 26 turns on the reel. This is a comfortable distance to cast but far enough out to encourage a number of fish into the swim. When it all goes quiet, it simply needs line adding or taking off the cast and I firstly go longer, only by four or five turns. If this doesn’t work then the fish may be closer in so I drop the cast to around 20 turns. Again, if this draws a blank then I may need to throw even further than I did. At some point though, you will find the fish and catch them.

Two feeders for two jobs
Although Method feeders catch a lot of bream in the summer at Barston, in winter I think the fish want groundbait at opposed to pellets so the cage feeder is the answer. The Main Lake is relatively shallow so a cage or plastic open end works well and my favourite is the Preston Innovations Plug It in the small 20g side, heavy enough to reach the spot but without putting in too much bait.
I will have a second rod set up though and this uses an in-line Cage feeder with a shorter hooklink. The reason for this is that because the bream are used to seeing Method feeders with the bait close by, they often attack the feeder to get the bait - the short tail puts the hookbait nearby. You’ll know if this is happening when using the Plug It feeder and longer tail because you will get a sharp knock on the tip very quickly after casting and then nothing. Then it’s time to change!

Rigging up
Things are relatively simple on this front with 4lb Power Max mainline to a 50cm link of 0.11mm Powerline (shortened to 8-10 inches for the inline Cage) and a size 16 PR412 hook. I do use a shockleader though, even with mono as it gives me a bit more poke when playing a bonus carp or F1 under the rod tip. This is several metres of 8lb Korum reel line. The rig itself runs on the mainline with the feeder on one of my home-made feeder links above a six inch length of twisted line to eliminate tangles. Needless to say I clip up to make sure I’m on the right spot each time.

Rod choice
It is easy to get an old favourite rod out of the bag every time but different lengths will make fishing so much easier. I have three of the new Preston Innovations Equis rods ready to go in my bag and for relatively short range, the 11ft model, a classic bream rod will do. However, if I need to cast beyond say 30 turns, then you will struggle to be super accurate unless you scale up to the 11ft 6in rod – that extra six inches really does make all the difference! There’s also a 12ft rod for really long casts when the water is clear and cold. Winter bream fishing in my experience is about distance and not depth – find the range that the fish are feeding at. The depth is irrelevant really.

Bloodworm and joker
These are baits that can stop a lot of anglers in their tracks. They think it’s too expensive and difficult to use but both are simply not true. A match pack of worm and joker is cheaper than buying half a kilo of worms and two pints of casters and you don’t have to faff around with leam to use it. Both are so natural to fish compared to casters or maggots and in winter when every bite counts, this is crucial.
The joker goes into my groundbait while bloodworm is used in bunches on the hook alongside dead maggots and pinkies. You don’t need to be packing the feeder with lots of goodies at this time of year so there’s no place for micro pellets, chopped worm or casters!

Three types of groundbait
Plain groundbait is okay to use when you are catching but in clearing water, I find that you need to put something in the feeder that makes something happen. Damp leam is the answer as this will put a bit of a cloud into the water that the fish can’t help but investigate.
So on my tray I have a bowl of just Sonubaits F1 Dark groundbait, a second bowl that is 50/50 F1 Dark and damp leam and finally a bowl of just leam. I’ll switch to leam when the swim seems dead or if I am changing lines and want to get things going quickly. When I’m catching again, I go back to just groundbait. To these feeds I will add a good helping of joker, not loads of the stuff but certainly enough to hold the fish when they arrive.

Hookbaits
Dead maggots and fluoro pinkies are my starting bait as a single maggot or double pinkie but as soon as I can, I want to get onto bloodworm. When I am catching well, I then make the change to five or six worms crammed onto the hook, perhaps tipped with a dead pinkie. Bream love bloodworm and once they find it, they can very rarely resist it!

Feel your way in
How long should you leave the feeder out there for? Surprisingly, the answer is not too long as I think that if the fish have been drawn in, a bite shouldn’t be long in coming. I don’t bosh in several feeders of bait at the start, preferring to build the swim simply with what’s in the feeder on each cast and I wait 10 minutes between chucks. If you are catching though, this will be much quicker and so you will be getting the feed in faster.

Matt Hayes: How to catch big tench

Matt Hayes reveals the feeding tactic that will revolutionise the way you fish for tench forever...

There was a time when tench fishing was all about being by the water at dawn watching a float sitting next to a bed of lily pads. Baits were simple, maggots, worms and sweetcorn was the menu, and you fished in hope (rather than expectation) that a tench would pay you a visit.

As a kid growing up in the West Midlands, tench were rare beasts for me - I didn’t catch one until I’d been fishing for a decade!

That first fish, all 2lb of it, had read the fishing text books. It fell to floatfished sweetcorn cast to the marginal lily pads at Himley Hall Lake, near Dudley.

Himley tench kept the same time clock as those across Britain, you had to be fishing at dawn because by 8am the fish totally switched off until late evening.

Fishing at dawn and dusk was the concrete rule.

But in 1980 I got a hint at what was to become a revolution in tenching methods.

Cheesed off with not being able to bag a tench after the dawn period, I began using the swimfeeder, by casting close to clumps of weed beyond the margins I managed to catch a few daytime tench.

Taking this knowledge to another water near my Shropshire home, in 1983/84 I fished the picturesque Dudmaston Hall estate lake.

Casting a feeder beyond the usual floatfishing spots brought me some huge hauls of tench and some 5lb ‘giants’ that regularly featured in the weekly angling press.

With the record then about 9lb (today it is 15lb 3oz!) these tench were national news!

The reason for telling you all this is that I want to stress how much things have changed in the last 15 to 20 years.

Yes, you can still catch tench on floatfished corn near a bed of lilies, but on many waters the swimfeeder has taken over.

This month I’m going show you how to catch these fish on the swimfeeder, using what I call the ‘Bait and Wait’ method.

Originally developed for use on large gravel pits, a nice side-effect of this tench revolution is that anglers trying the technique on estate lakes and club lakes have discovered that much older populations of tench are also partial to the baits and tactics I’m about to explain.

Make no bones about it, these modern tench fishing methods are extremely productive on a cross section of stillwaters and to help you catch them I’ve created a six step guide to success...

STEP 1 - LOCATE THE FISH

Many anglers visiting a big gravel pit or estate lake for the first time are daunted by the scale of the water facing them.

All I can say is don’t worry about the size of the lake.

If you mentally break the lake up into smaller chunks you’ll find it’s far easier to explore one small piece of water at a time.

Start your attack on any lake by picking one or two areas with ‘form’ for tench. Chat to bailiffs, water owners or regular anglers and I’ll bet any money that certain swims will consistently get a mention. Start there.

STEP 2 - FIND THE HOTSPOTS

In most gravel pits and lakes you’ll encounter numerous depth changes as the undulating lake bed gives you a variety of shallow bars, flat plateaus and deep channels.

So, where do you fish?

The first place to look is right at your feet. Tench like feeding on or just over the marginal drop off and I’ve caught some huge gravel pit fish less than a rod length out from the bank.

But the reality on most lakes these days is that the bankside disturbance is likely to drive the tench away from the margin.

This means you’ve got to fish further out and it is vital that you map out the various depths of your swim - the tackle for the job is a marker float set up. The photo (right) shows how simple it is to set up a marker float.

Tie a 3oz leger and a large sliding ring to either end of a short length of 15lb-plus monofilament. Leave around eight inches of line between the leger and the ring.

Slide this leger link onto your mainline, (I prefer 20lb braid) then tie a fat bodied, marker float on the end of the line.

That’s it. You’ve done the supposedly difficult job of setting up a marker float – how easy is that?

As the diagram (below) displays, all you then do is go to your chosen swim and cast out the float.

When it hits the water, slowly wind in all the slack line to pull the float down to the leger until it hits the ring. You’ll feel the float jam against it and the line goes solid.

Next, slacken the drag on your reel and pull a foot of line at a time off the spool. Count how many feet it takes for the float to reappear on the surface - that’s the depth of the water.

By casting across your swim you’ll map any depth variations and underwater features that are attractive to tench.

By inching the leger across the lakebed you’ll also discover the thickness of any weed. Thick weed will grip the float, whereas in areas of sparse cover you’ll feel the leger bounce across the hard bottom, or pluck against occasional strands of weed.

Ideally, I look for a swim where an area of sparse weed is surrounded by thick weed.

At the venue where these pictures were taken, Horseshoe Lake in Gloucestershire, I fished the perfect tench spot.

Located at 40 yards range, within easy casting distance of a loaded swimfeeder, I found a patch of thinner weed surrounded by the heavy stuff.

Perfect. I knew my rig and bait would be presented cleanly but the heavy weed nearby would give sanctuary from which to attract fish to my baited area.

STEP 3 - BAIT AND WAIT

Whereas I used to catch tench by regularly loosefeeding a few maggots or grains of corn round my float, the cornerstone of my modern tench attack is a ‘bait and wait’ tactic – I lay a large bed of feed on the bottom then wait for fish to settle on it.

If you are fishing at short range you can bait an area by catapult, for feeding at longer distances you can use groundbait to bind feed into balls that can be catapulted further.

But the best way to lay a bed of bait 30 or 40 yards from the bank is with a bait rocket, also known as a ‘spod’. Spodding is a technique many dismiss as being too advanced. I’ve often been told it’s something reserved for the ‘bivvy boys’.

Well, I’m telling you it isn’t hard to do at all, and here’s what you need to start spodding:

>> A strong, cheap, spod rod. Several firms produce them for around £50, like my TF Gear Signature Spod rod.

>> A large capacity reel, I use the £50 Okuma Axeon.

>> Braided mainline, such as 30lb TF Gear Grunt Banana braid.

>> A spod, like the Free Spirit Particle Spod.

All you do is thread the braided line through the rings of the spod rod, tie on the spod, fill it with bait and cast it at your marker float.

As the diagram (above) shows, when the spod hits the water the buoyant nose causes it to ‘up end’ and the bait is dumped on the spot you’ve selected with the float. EASY!

Spodding has four great advantages:

1 - With practice it allows you to deliver bait with great accuracy.

2 - It shortcircuits baiting up – you can spod lots of bait in 10 minutes giving you more time to go fishing.

3 - Spods allow you to feed small particles of food beyond catapult range. These tiny bits of food hold fish in your swim for a long time.

4 - It gets you catching quickly. With a carpet of feed on the lakebed fish respond quickly to your hookbait.

In the sequence (below), I detail what baits I use in the spod but I also show you how I load it to ensure minimum spillage when I cast out.

1. Load half the spod with a mix of hemp, corn and a few maple peas

2. Fill a quarter of the spod with pellets and a few small boilies

3. Add a groundbait cap to the spod to stop any contents spilling on the cast

4. Gently tap down the feed - it will explode on contact with the water

Now to the business end and the good news is my rig is easy to tie and uses the most basic of baits - maggots.

As the diagram (above) shows, I use a ready-tied TF Gear Secret Trap leader, fitted with a lead clip, onto which I slip a large Drennan openend feeder. The feeder is stuffed with red maggots sandwiched between two plugs of groundbait (top right).

As for my hooklink, I use a knotless knot (see sequence below) to attach a size 10 Korda Wide Gape hook to a 10lb TF Gear Invisilink hooklink. It’s a soft, tough line to take the strain of playing tench in weed. In fact the only remotely clever bit of the rig is the hookbait.

As you can, see I fill the hook with four or five maggots but also thread a sliver of red rig foam to the hair loop formed with the knotless knot.

Why? Well the weight of the hook will be off-set by the foam, making the hookbait behave naturally and appear less suspicious to a fish.

1. Get some red rig foam. Firms like Fox and Solar produce it.

2. Cut the foam into a maggoty-looking sliver. It doesn’t need to be a work of art, just a maggot sized barrel!

3. Tie a loop in the end of your hooklink line and thread the foam onto it.

4. Thread the line through the back of the eye on a size 10 Korda Wide Gape.

5. Position the fake foam maggot at the back of the hook. The top of the ‘bait’ should be level with the hook bend.

6. Whip the line down the shank five times, work from the eye toward the bend. Pass the line through the back of the eye.

7. This is what the finished knotless knot looks like with the foam ‘maggot’ in place to counter the weight of the hook.

8. Add three, four or five red maggots to the hook to complete the hookbait. Tench love red maggots.

How to fish the feeder for bream in rivers

In 1956 a 15-year-old Dave Bosher, fishing on the Child Beale stretch of the River Thames, hooked his fi rst decent bream.

This fish started a love affair with river bream fishing that has continued for over 50 years.

Now, he’s back in the swim where it all began, an area that he has grown up near and fished in for the past half century.

Similar to all those years ago, the River Thames’ bream shoals are still here and they are here in abundance.

“I remember seeing shoals over 100-yards long and from bank to bank; literally hundreds of thousands of them,” said Dave.

“It’s a sight that I have never forgotten and it keeps drawing me back - year in, year out.” With a commendation this good, we just had to send the IYCF cameras along to the Child Beale stretch, located in Theale Park, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, for a masterclass in river bream fishing.

With five decades of know how and experience under his belt Dave had to be the perfect choice to take us through the finer points of catching big, slabsided River Thames bream…

THE FIGHT OF A RIVER BREAM

Punching his groundbait swimfeeder 60 yards across the river, it landed with pinpoint accuracy over the area he’d been baiting.

Moments later, a large splash on the surface revealed Dave had got the bream going - the fish were rolling over his bait.

“They’ve been having it all morning,” Dave revealed. “It took an hour to get the first bite, but since then it has been fish-after-fish.”

Placing the rod on his raised rod rest, Dave carefully tightened up to the feeder, placing a slight bend in the quivertip of his feeder rod.

A few minutes later he had a sharp line bite, no doubt caused by a big slad-sided bream turning in the water,. Within seconds the tip sprang back as a fish picked up his hookbait and dislodged the feeder.

A broad sweeping strike over his right shoulder saw Dave pick up the line and connect with a hefty fish. Standing up, to get a better angle to hold the bream out of the weedbeds littering the bottom, he  deliberately played the fish towards the bank.

Unlike their flabby, lake-bound cousins that can fight a wet paper bag, river bream fight like tigers.

Once they turn their broad bodies into the flow, they use the current to test your tackle to the very edge of breaking point.

It took Dave over five minutes to bring the fish from where he was fishing, 60 yards out, to a position where he could successfully land the creature.

Once it was in the net we were able to appreciate why it had taken so long to land. Weighing just over 8lb, it was a magnificent specimen and testified how good river breaming can be.

PRE-BAITING

Being nomadic, pre-baiting an area the day before you fish can tip the scales in your favour. If you put a bed of bait down you should stop a shoal of bream in its tracks.

These fish are eating machines, spending their days searching for food. If you can give them a load of freebies, you should be able to hold them, as it gives the shoal the confidence to stay in the area.

“I pre-baited an area last night” explained Dave, “not only does this concentrate the shoal, but it helps to get their heads down feeding.”

Dave pre-baits with what he is planning to fish with. In this instance, it comprised four kilos of two-parts brown crumb, onepart Dynamite Baits Black Swim Stim groundbait and a kilo of 3mm pellets.

Although four-kilos isn’t a lot of pre-bait for a big shoal, Child Beale is a match fishing stretch, so it sees a lot of bait.

“I only want to put out enough bait to give the bream a taster of my groundbait mix. They will then be more receptive when it comes to the actual session.”

LOCATING THE SHOALS

One of the hardest things, with regard to river bream fishing, is trying to locate the shoal.

A nomadic species, they can roam for miles along a river, looking for food and stopping off in areas that offer consistent feeding opportunities.

This means the best place to start your bream quest isn’t even by the water. To short-cut the shoal search chat to local experts, such as a tackle dealer or bailiff, to see if you can pinpoint the rivers’ noted bream swims.

“The thing about this stretch is that bream are always here,” Dave said.

“Maybe there is a bloodworm bed out there that attracts them, but for whatever reason they’re always in the same area, year-after-year.

“My advice would be to ask around and once you have found a good area, remember it. Once  you have found an area that they like, you have won half the battle.”

CASTING AND KEEPING THE SHOAL

As with stillwater feeder fishing, it is always best to line up the cast with a permanent far bank marker and cast to the line clip. This ensures you are accurately casting every feeder where you want it. Once you have the bream feeding in the area, cast slightly short of your prebaited area. Therefore, if you hook a fish you are not dragging it through the rest of the shoal, which will avoid spooking them. Dave’s final casting tip on rivers is DO NOT twitch the feeder back to empty it, as you would on a stillwater.

“By twitching the feeder back on this stretch you will only pull the hook into weed, ruining the presentation,” said Dave.

TACKLE

For his session on the Thames, Dave was using a Daiwa Connoisseur feeder rod combined with 6lb Berkley Trilene monofilament line.

Unlike many bream anglers, Dave never uses braid, preferring the stretch that mono gives.

“I find mono is more forgiving than braid,” he said.

“Once in the flow these fit river bream put up a tremendous scrap and as braid has no stretch, the fish can easily come off. On a river these fish aren’t shy and when you have to play a big fish through the flow, braid is a recipe for disaster,” he continued.

Six pound line may sound heavy for bream fishing, but when you are making around 100 casts in the day and playing 7lb-plus fish across the flow, it would be suicidal to go lower.

Correct quivertip choice is also vital when river breaming. On a stillwater, it is best to use a very light tip, such as a 1oz model, to register any shy bites. While you still need to fish as light a possible on a river, you must ‘beef’ things up a bit and match the strength of the tip to the strength of flow.

This involves a little trial and error, with Dave suggesting you carry a selection of different weighted tips.

“The best way to select a tip is to start light, around 2oz,” he explained.

“Then cast the empty feeder to where you will be fishing and put the rod on the rest to see how the tip reacts. If the strength of the river bends the tip right round, you are using too light a tip and it will offer too much resistance to a taking fish.

“If the tip remains arrow straight, then the tip is too heavy and will not show delicate bites. If the tip just bends slightly, it is spot on.

“This may sound time consuming, having to tackle down and re-tackle to change tips, but it is better to spend a few minutes getting things right now than spending the next few hours blanking.”

Dave’s choice of swimfeeder for the day was a Drennan Gripmesh. These cage style feeders are ideal for shallow water, but for fishing in deeper water Dave wraps PVC tape around them. This stops the groundbait exiting the feeder too quickly when it hits the water.

“The weight of these feeders is ideal for casting. The groundbait will add another ounce and this balances my set-up perfectly for casting to the area I want to fish,” Dave added.

Dave’s hooklink is 18 inches of 0.16mm (5lb 5oz) WB Clarke Match Team high-tech line.

Again, this might sound heavy, but the weed in the Thames can be very thick and a lighter hooklink will not give you the strength to land the fish. The hook is a strong size 14 Drennan Carbon Chub.

DAVE’S FAVOURITE HOOKBAITS

Four red maggots: This is Dave’s first hookbait choice and the bait he generally kicks off with. Four maggots are a little more selective, but if you start to get plagued with roach and perch swap to another bait.

Worms: Two small dendrobaena worms threaded up the line to leave the hook exposed is Dave’s unique way of presenting worms (below).

“It’s like a reverse hair-rig, where the bait is presented above the hook rather than below it as with a normal hair-rig set-up.”

Double caster: One of the all time classical bream hookbaits, casters are a bait that are loved by bream all over the country (above right).

HOW TO PUT THE GROUNDBAIT TO WORK

Plugging one end of his swimfeeder with groundbait, Dave filled it with casters and then plugging the other end,

He then cast five feeder loads of casters followed by five feederfuls of worms to lay a small bed of feed.

Retrieving the rig, Dave used some groundbait to sandwich casters inside his swimfeeder, threaded two worms onto the hook and cast towards the spot he’d prebaited the day before.

After an hour of recasting every 10 minutes, the bream moved into his swim and Dave started to get among the fish.

It was exciting fishing too, as every bream used the flow to test Dave’s tackle to the limit.

After spending a few hours watching Dave do battle with over 70lb of hardfighting bronzed bream, it became apparent that river ‘slabs’ are a very different beast to their lake-bound counterparts.

If you are the type of person that has always written off bream fishing as boring, lacklustre and dull, then you are definately missing a trick.

Maybe you should head down to your local river and have a few hours fun with these bronze-flanked beasts.

Let’s face it, these fabulous fish have kept Dave Bosher going back to the same swim for 50 years and you don’t get a much better commendation than that!