Pole Fishing Tips | Six feeding tips for silvers on natural venues - Josh Newman

Little-and-often is a tried and tested way of feeding for silverfish, but there are occasions in summer when a bolder approach is required.

Be bold with your feeding for summer silvers and you will catch more

Feed heavily to start

At the start I’ll throw in 14 large balls of the groundbait and leam mix. This sounds a lot, but I won’t be feeding any more of this mix, so I need a good amount to try and keep the fish in the peg.

Kick off the swim by balling it in

Top-up with more

When I think the effect of the cloud from balling in has finished, it’s time to add more feed with a pot. This is a mix of damp leam and grey leam (half a bag of damp to just 25ml of grey), plus particles.

Top-up with more feed when you think the initial balls have had their effect

Keep loosefeeding

Loosefeeding hemp is important. It not only gives me the chance to catch on it late in the day, but it also keeps on drawing fish into the swim by having something falling through the water all the time.

Steady feeding with hemp will keep fish interested

Set up Multiple rigs

Because of the cloud, I can catch fish 6ins off bottom and then switch to the deck later. One rig won’t do both jobs, so I set a couple up. Both are Sensas Avon floats with a 0.8g for fishing off deck and then a 1.25g pattern for down below.

Multiple rigs will ensure you can catch fish at all layers

Dot your float down

The less float bristle you have on show, the more bites you will hit. Trying to shot a float  with small split shot is tricky, so I use micro styls. I’ll shot the float as normal, then add four or five tiny styls to leave just a speck showing.

Dot your float right down to hit sensitive bites

Try ‘Short’ elastics

In deep pegs of over 10ft, you need a strong elastic to set the hook. Running elastic through a top kit would require around a No6, which is too heavy. My solution is to use a length of No4 elastic through just the tip section of the kit.

A light elastic through just the tip section will land you more fish

A cracking net of natural water silvers

Match Fishing Tips | 5 tips to catch more canal silvers in summer

We all like to catch bonus fish, but on canals it’s small fish that are your weight-building summer bankers. Here are five tips to help you fill a net with silvers…

Avoid deep water

You can rule out catching well from the central boat channel of a canal in summer. There will be too much disturbance from narrowboats, even though the water is deep. On the whole, roach prefer shallower water anyway, and a classic spot to find them is on top of the far-bank shelf where the deep water merges into the shallows. Typically this area can be found around 11m or 12m out, a comfortable range for feeding and shipping the rig out. Depth is unimportant – it’s more about finding the point where the peg just begins to deepen into the channel.

Find the point where the peg deepens into the channel

Create a slow-falling rig

Because you’re loosefeeding, the rig needs to allow you to catch fish through the water, anywhere from a few inches under the surface down to the bottom. Firing in pinkies and squatts will naturally bring roach off bottom, so gear up with rigs taking light floats and shotting patterns that have small No11 shot strung as a bulk around an inch apart, stopping 12ins from the hook, finishing off with a couple of dropper shot between bulk and hook. 

Light floats and strung out shotting will help the bait fall slowly through the water

Get on hemp

Don’t think you’re only going to catch small roach on the canal – they also hold plenty of big fish that can make a difference in a match! Casters are a well-known bait for quality roach, but hemp is just as good and almost always means a bigger fish each time the float goes under. Pick a spot close to any far-bank cover with a couple of feet of water, well away from where you’re fishing squatts, and fire in a dozen grains every 10 minutes, aiming to try hemp on the hook in the second half of the match.

Hemp is a fantastic roach bait

GO easy on the groundbait

As much as roach love groundbait, it comes into play on shallow canals as a way of kicking the swim off before loosefeeding takes over, or for feeding when a boat has gone through the peg and you need to settle the fish back down. One large ball fed at the start is ample, feeding again with the same size of ball when a boat has done its damage. 

Try not to fill the fish up with groundbait

Pick up your catty and start feeding!

As soon as you’ve fed that groundbait at the start, pick up the catapult and start firing in squatts or pinkies. Twenty to 25 squatts at a time is not too much, and the feeding needs to be very regular, every 40 seconds or so, to leave a constant stream of bait falling through the water and keep the fish hunting around. On the hook, a single squatt matches the hatch, but you can change to a fluoro pinkie to try for a slightly bigger fish.

Regular loose feeding will keep the fish in the peg!

Canal Fishing Tips | Target the wides for canal bream with Alan Donnelly

Canals are generally narrow, with not much more than 13m of water to go at. But dotted along the length of most of them are wider parts. 

These are turning points for boats or, in some cases, they were widened out when the canals were first dug back in the 1800s. From a fishing point of view, these wides act as a magnet to fish and anglers.

Boats don’t have too much of an impact on the waggler line because it’s tucked well away from the boat channel

Some wides can have 30m-plus of water while others can be incredibly shallow and are not all that they seem. Given a good depth and some cover, though, they’re brilliant and the ideal sort of swim to banish any thoughts that canals are all about tiny fish and battles with barges and mountain bikes.

Bream, especially, like these wider sections, but there’s a problem. Often the pole won’t be long enough to get to the fish. The answer is very much old-school, ditching the pole for rod and line tactics with a little waggler. This approach was the norm on canals back in the 1970s before the pole took over. We’re talking short rods, stumpy light floats and loosefeeding – a lovely way to catch fish.

Bream love to hang around in wide sections

My local Grand Union Canal around Tring has plenty of wides and they’re all home to bream that can be caught on the float. It’s easy to find a wide swim. The hard work is in deciding where to fish in the peg and how best to approach it. Groundbait can play a part, but loosefeeding can be better on some days.

The waggler is a great option to get the best out of a wide peg, letting you fish places you can’t reach with the pole and catch the fish that may have backed off to the other side of the canal. 

I use specially-made floats by Graham Welton

It’s also a lot easier to fish than the long pole. Not everyone can manage 16m of pole, especially if the wind is blowing, then there’s the hassle of unshipping back on to narrow towpaths with bikes, joggers and dog walkers filing past.

The waggler does away with all of that. It’s an efficient method too, in fact when you’re catching well on it, it’s miles faster than fishing the pole.

Tackle doesn’t need to be specialised, you may well already have a lot of what’s needed in the shed. Base your attack around short, light floats, small hooks and minimal shotting down the line. A good through-actioned match rod is just the job. Add a few pints of casters as bait and a catapult and you’re more or less there!

An 11ft rod gives you the control for relatively short casts and is easier to use than a 13ft model. I use an 11ft Drennan Ultralight Matchpro.

Carp Fishing Tips - Tackle challenging canals

IF YOU can get off the hustle and bustle of the towpath, the country’s canals offer miles and miles of often untapped carping potential.

As a starting point, snags or cover can be good hotspots. One thing to remember is that canal carp can be very nomadic so a spot may be prime one day and fishless the next.

There are several things to take into consideration when fishing canals, the first being bait. In a lot of our canals the carp are relatively opportunistic, making the most of food thrown off the side of boats or in bird feeding areas.

If you aren’t the sort of person who is going to spend a lot of time prebaiting, these areas of free feed are certainly worth investigating.

If you want to be more selective with your bait, you need to fish with boilies, big ones at that. Part of the challenge of canal fishing is the host of other species you will have to contend with and even an 18mm boilie won’t deter a greedy bream.

Boats provide great cover for carp

Three top tips for canal carping

1. To avoid complications with boats when fishing from the bank, pin your lines to the bottom with a backlead. Do not plot up next to a mooring area or too close to a lock which may get a lot of use.

Backloads are essential kit for fishing canals

2. Canal carp can be very nomadic. Try concentrating your feed by pre-baiting likely looking spots. If you aren’t able to do this, make the most of natural feed areas such as bird feeding spots.

Try pre-baiting some likely looking spots

3.Try fishing a snowman hookbait with a bottom bait of at least 18mm topped with a 12mm or even a 15mm pop-up. This should help deter unwanted bream. 

A snowman hook bait is good for avoiding bream

Catch quality winter roach from a town centre canal

There can be fewer more famous canal venues in the UK than the legendary ‘hotties’ section of the Sankey St Helen’s Canal running through the middle of St Helen’s.
When the water was warmed by the Pilkington Glass factory on the banks of the canal back in the 70’s through to the 90’s, the water would steam in winter and with artificially high temperatures, unusual species for a canal could be caught including carp and even the odd tropical fish dumped into the venue by owners.
That was a while ago though and the ‘hotties’ are no longer steaming – but the fish are still there and that’s the message that controlling club St Helen’s AA are trying to get across to match anglers by running regular matches where those carp still have a part to play.
Alongside the big fish, the match angler is also likely to be catching your standard canal fare of roach, perch and bream, weights being respectable over the Christmas and New Year break and into 2017. It was for that reason that club members and local matchmen Andy Burrows and England vets legend Danny Sixsmith agreed to show what the ‘hotties’ has to offer in the modern era.

“I can remember 10 years ago the canal still steaming from the ‘gusher’ pipe that went into the canal and it was one of the few canals in the UK where you could catch carp from 2oz to 20lb because they bred throughout the year thanks to the warm water,” Andy said. “A Boxing Day match was one won with 99lb of them and every match we’ve run this winter has seen carp caught. I think 10 was the most in one match and that was when there was ice on the water!”
However, you’ll need to catch the canal right to get the carp as they seem to prefer clear water. On the day of Andy and Danny’s trip, rain had coloured the water and carp seemed to be unlikely. Fortunately, there are also lots of big roach and an ever-increasing head of big skimmers to go for.

“There are two distinct areas to the Sankey – a deep part and a shallow section but it never seems to matter where you fish as the sports is equally good and there’s no boat channel either because the canal is landlocked so the depth is constant all the way across so you can often use just the one rig!” he continued. “The canal did fall out of favour a bit because of expensive car parking but now the council offer free parking on Sundays and £2 a day throughout the week so access is as good as it has ever been.”
There’s also no hassle with cyclists and runners on the towpath as paths have been built well back from the water to keep all users of the Sankey happy. All of this adds up to make the canal what Andy thinks is the best canal in the country and one that is criminally underfished.
“If roach and bream are the target, as they are today, you can forget all about faffing around with squatts and tiny hooks plus light feeding as the fish actually respond better to a lot of feed meaning that you can fish positively,” he said. “There’s no need to go right across to the far bank either thanks to that constant depth and I typically have four pole lines in a match, one starting at around 6m from where I then work my way out by two sections at a time as the day goes on, plus a swim off to one side with a view to catching bream.”
Andy’s rig for the canal does use a typical light 4x10 canal float in the shallow areas with lines of 0.13mm main to an 0.09mm hooklink and a size 18 or 20 Kamasan B512 hook finished with a 2 to 4 grade hollow elastic fished with a puller kit. This way he can catch the big roach and skimmers but also deal with a carp if he hooks them. The big fish tend to plod around in winter so there’s no need for heavy gear and this is used on all four lines.

“I kick off at 6m where I pot in a quarter of a large pot of maggots, fishing double fluoro pinkie on the hook but I’ll also feed those others swims with the same amount of maggots, the skimmer line getting a ball of sweet bream groundbait packed with dead pinkies, casters, micro pellets and chopped worm,” Andy revealed. “You can feed a lot of bait on here and it won’t be unusual to get through four pints of maggots in a match. The key is to feed to your bites so if you are catching, you can loosefeed far more and get through the bait.”
“The skimmer line is not somewhere to have an odd look at through the day though because I’ve found that the bream get onto the bait very quickly so I would spend a good bit of time fishing here but not too long. If the bream are there you should get them quickly but if not, get back on the roach.”
For carp when the water is clear, Andy still swears by maggots as you can catch the roach and skimmers while waiting for the carp. Pellets can work but are too selective.
The day that Andy and Danny picked couldn’t have been worse with howling winds limiting how far out you could sensibly fish but it didn’t affect the fishing with lots of bites from some quality roach and a few of those famed skimmers. As expected, the carp didn’t show but with 15lb of fish apiece to show for their efforts, that didn’t matter one bit.
If you thought that canal fishing was all about dodging pole-smashing bikes and catching 2lb of tiny fish, the Sankey shows that nothing could be further from the truth. Apparently, it’s even better in the summer!

Fish the Sankey
Controlled by St Helen’s AA, the Sankey can be fished on their £30 club book which also includes Carr Mill Dam. Matches run every Sunday with no peg fee taken so your £10 pools are paid out 100%. To book on, give Andy a call on 07849 608448.