How to find the quality fish with Bob Nudd

Even though I’m a small-fish man at heart, there’s still nothing to match the excitement of running a float down a river swim and striking into something substantially bigger on the other end!

Be it a perch, chub, bream or tench, targeting quality fish on rivers is a totally different challenge to setting your stall out for a bag of small roach.

Yet the tactics, baits and feeding are surprisingly simple, and the rewards can be relatively quick in coming.

This is especially true when fishing smaller, more intimate, rivers where there’s less water to play with. My local Old River Nene in March town centre is one such example, being only around 13m or 14m wide with an average depth of 5ft down the middle.

Now, the Old Nene may be best known for its winter roach sport and it may not look that much cop at first glance – but in October, it’s home to some big fish as well, especially quality rudd, skimmers, eels, perch and even the chance of a tench or three – fish that seem to vanish when the cold weather arrives.

But that’s not for a good few weeks yet, so it really is time now to go there with better quality fish in mind. I’d say that’s true of many smaller rivers.

A bit of colour in the water will also help, but even in clear water there’s still every chance of a few fish that will pull your elastic out of the pole.

My approach for these fish revolves around fishing the pole at a comfortable distance and using groundbait, chopped worm and casters, three items that all fish love and which should avoid the smaller species that the Old Nene is also full of.

To put it into practice, I’ve come to the scout hut section of the river where there’s a good chance of some skimmers and one or two lovely golden rudd.

Move the rig

A lot of better fish are caught by holding the rig dead still over the feed, but I don’t do this all of the time.

Instead, the float will be inched through the peg slowly to cover a good few yards of the swim, just to see if the fish prefer a moving bait or are sat just downstream of the feed.

Having around 2ft of line between pole and float helps here, but in stronger flows this would be lengthened to as much as 5ft to let me cover more of the peg. In terms of plumbing up, I set the float to be fished three inches overdepth.

The session

Kicking off on double maggot, it doesn’t hit the bottom as a string of rudd hold the float up and swim off! Changing to caster and redworm is no better, and even half a dendra results in the same, but this is normal just after feeding. The fish are pulled in and go a little mad, swimming about everywhere.

After an hour and plenty of rudd, things settle and the worm gets to the bottom. Chunky perch are first to arrive, and a couple of rudd getting on for 1lb also get in on the act. With few small fish about, I can now revert to baits more suited to skimmers. Double caster catches a few rudd-bream hybrids, quality roach and hand-sized skimmers.

After two hours it’s time for a top-up, and thankfully the small fish don’t reappear. After a few perch something bigger is on, but I get the sneaking suspicion it’s an eel. At 2lb it puts up a right old scrap. Ten minutes later I hook another big fish, again on caster, but it snags me and the hook pulls. I have no idea what it was!

From this point on, it’s a case of running the float through – this seems best on the day – topping up with another ball when the small fish turn up and taking what I can. None of those bream or skimmers show, but with rudd, hybrids, roach, perch and small skimmers coming one a chuck, it’s a lovely day’s fishing. The beauty of it is that you never know if that next run through is going to produce a monster!

Hookbaits

This is a case of trial and error, starting bait always being two fluoro pink maggots. If small fish are a problem, it’s on to double caster and then two halves of redworm.

Failing all that, it’s a 2ins-long piece of dendrobaena worm. As a rule, dendras seem to catch more perch, with the rudd and skimmers preferring maggots or casters, so I try to spend as much time as I can fishing the latter.

Big rigs

Because I could hook a tench or even a carp on this river, tackle must be sensible. I’ll fish 0.16mm Browning Hybrid Power mono mainline to a 12ins hooklink of the same line but in 0.14mm diameter. Hook is a size 14 Kamasan B512 to an orange grade Browning Microbore hollow elastic that works out at around a No8 in old money.

With this gear, I’m confident of landing anything I hook.

Floats also need to be big, not only to deal with the flow but also to get around small fish that with a light pattern can easily hold the bait up as it falls. For me, it’s a 1.5g pear-shaped pattern that’s been designed for me by DT Floats. By using an olivette and a couple of No9 droppers relatively close to the hook I can be sure that the bait will go straight to the bottom. If it doesn’t, I simply push the olivette and shot together to create one bulk.

Pick the right line

The first job is to decide where to fish. At March, the river is typical in that there are two shallow shelves close in and right across that slope down to a deep central channel used by boats. This is where I’d expect the better fish to be and the good news is that it only takes around 7m or 8m of pole to be fishing here.

It’s true that this central channel can attract rubbish, branches and weed, so it is well worth running a rig through the swim before you do anything else to check exactly what’s waiting under the surface.

With some careful plumbing up, though, you will find a clear spot to run over.

Feeding

This involves groundbait, worms and casters which will appeal to a range of species with less chance of pulling in small perch or eels, which worm and caster fed on its own can. I’ll cup three big balls in at the start, making sure to pack them with as much worm and caster as I can.

Groundbait mix is 50/50 Van Den Eynde Black Turbo and Gold Pro Bream, to which I add some yellow Sinking Crumbs to make them stand out on the bottom.

This is my go-to mix for skimmers and better fish in Ireland and it works just as well back home. I mix this the night before to make it relatively inactive and on the dry side to take into account the moisture from the worms and casters.

To form three balls I simply cup an amount in both hands three times and transfer it into another tub. I then put in a good handful of casters and a full pole cup of chopped dendra worms that are cut to a fine texture as opposed to large chunks.

I chop the worms in the cup, as I find it much easier than using a bait tub. The lot is mixed together and each ball potted in using a far-bank marker on a point that is just downstream of my fishing position.