Tips

Bread has been the go-to bait for winter roach on the drains and small waters of East Anglia for decades – so much so that the alternative for a netful of fish, groundbait and pinkie, has become a little redundant.

However, if you put your faith entirely in bread you can, at times, be going down the wrong route entirely. Times when the river is heavily coloured and has a bit of pace on it, or where thousands of smaller roach are present, are just perfect for a pinkie attack. It will speed up your fishing no end and always beat the bread men.

Take the Welland in Spalding, where I am today. This is a typical town centre river that’s been well coloured for months after all of the rain we had before Christmas.

Bread has grabbed the headlines for 50lb nets of roach but groundbait and pinkie is, in my opinion, equally as good, if not better, when the river is running and you need to keep the fish pinned down in one place.

For that reason, I’ve left the punch crumb and breadpunches at home and with a few kilos of groundbait and pints of pinkies, I’m itching to get cracking and get stuck into those plump ‘stamp’ roach that have made this river a must-fish over the last few weeks!

Groundbait menu

Four types of groundbait make up my mix and they all have different jobs. My base is Sensas Gros Gardons and Super Canal Black to which I add half a bag of Sensas Black River to make the mix stickier and heavier. The final ingredient is 250ml of PV1 Binder, which acts as the cement in the mix.

Pinkies can soon break a ball of groundbait up so I don’t add loads to the mix, beginning with 150ml of them and the same amount of hemp across all the groundbait I’ve mixed. You want just enough in there so you can see a few when a ball is made.

When pinkies rule

Bread will work 90 per cent of the time at Spalding but if the river is more coloured than normal and flowing harder, groundbait is better to keep the fish exactly where I want them. What’s more, I’m confident of catching those better fish in among the tiddlers.

Pinkie as a hookbait is vital, as maggots are just too selective and mean a longer wait for bites. It has to be bright fluoro pinkies on the hook and enough of them are crammed into the groundbait to get the roach hunting about.

This hookbait also allows you to catch several fish on the same bait and means that if you miss a bite, you only need to drop back in and get fishing again. With bread, you’d need to bait up again.

Opening feed & ‘top up’

Two large balls go in at the start, and I will only feed groundbait from this point. Loosefeeding is pointless, as it will only push the fish down the peg and pull in a smaller stamp of roach too.

Faced with a lot of fish, you need to keep topping up regularly to ensure that the stamp of roach is right. This can mean potting in another big ball every 20 minutes.

When to feed again is decided by when the bites slow right down, the size of fish drops away or if the river flows in the opposite direction, which can happen on the Welland at times!

This re-feed is one large ball but I will also feed a smaller, richer ball packed with pinkies on occasion. This is when I have fed a big ball and caught a few but feel more bait is needed. Adding a big ball so soon is too much but a smaller ball full of pinkies is enough to get the fish back to where I want them.

Changing depths

I will plumb each rig up to fish at dead depth, but you won’t catch all day like this. Sometimes the fish will want the pinkies presented an inch or two overdepth while on others, fishing off bottom can work best.

My advice is to try both and see which works better. A good pointer for this is if you are catching roach with the hook down their throats. If so, this tells me that I need to come shallower to lip-hook them each time.

Three rigs

The Welland can flow hard one minute and stand still the next, so you need to be ready with a range of rigs.

Three will generally cover pinkie fishing – the main float is a 0.6g rugby ball-shaped pattern but I also have a 1g float in the same shape for when the flow picks up and an old school Image Pole Stick of 0.5g for when the river is flowing hard. This works like a mini stick float and I prefer it to a flat float as it still lets me run the bait down the peg.

Terminal tackle is the same on all rigs, made up of 0.14mm Sensas Feeling mainline to a 6ins hooklink of 0.10mm Feeling and a size 18 Hayabusa 157 hook for double pinkie, my preferred hookbait.

Shotting on the two rugby ball rigs is a straight bulk of No8 shot and a single dropper of the same size. Only on the Pole Stick does this alter, with a bulk and four or five droppers, so I can waft the bait around when holding back.

Elastic choice is a little different, though, and is based around the size of roach I am catching. It’s a No8 Slip set soft. That sounds a bit ‘agricultural’ but is ideal for swinging in 4oz roach that you’d have to net if using a No5, for example. Little things like this make a big difference when speed is the key.