River Fishing Tips | How to empty a swim with Darren Cox

You can’t beat a big old river for a real test of your fishing skills – a river that asks plenty of questions and demands a thorough trawling of the old grey matter to reward you with just a few fish.

But catching well on running water isn’t as difficult as it may first appear.

River fish need to feed every day in order to survive, and that means they can be caught regardless of conditions. You need to work out where in the swim they are and how the fish want the bait presented so they’ll wolf it down.

We call this ‘finding the sweet spot’, a point where your feed meets the fish and where you’ll get 99 per cent of your bites. Working this out can take time, but do it properly and the rest is child’s play. It’s all to do with the pace and depth of the swim and what the riverbed is made of.

Finding the right spot

The bailiff or a local tackle shop will put you on the right swim, ideally with a hard gravel bottom and around 5ft of water to go at. As for pace, a river flowing at the speed of a gentle walk is what you’re after.

There’s no better way of doing this than using the waggler to search the peg. You need a clean bottom of gravel or one that’s snag-free to get the best results, fishing overdepth with the bait laid on the riverbed to slow it down. We call this ‘reverse dragging’. Set the rig 4ins-5ins overdepth so that the bait will drag on the riverbed, making it slower than the pace of the river.

Feeding correctly

Now loosefeed at the top of the swim (directly in front of you). Whether you’re using maggots or hemp, the feed will hit the bottom in one rough area, a point that the fish will move up to and mill around waiting for a free meal – that’s the sweet spot. 

Cast the waggler 10yds or so further down the peg. This means the bait ends up settling just above where the feed has landed, which in turn leads to quicker bites. Fishing in front of or beyond this spot will produce nothing, but for that golden five or six seconds when the bait is run in the right place, the float will keep on going under.

Within the opening hour of a session the fish will quickly show you where the sweet spot is, and you can then adjust how far down the peg you cast to speed things up even faster.

Keep feeding and casting in the same spots and you’re well on the way!