Links to Beginners Guide to Angling 

Also see Haydn`s Video Page

 Begginners Guide To Fishing

Beginners Guide to Buying a Pole

Beginners Guide to Pole Rigs

How to  Elasticate a Pole

 How to catch more Fish ?????

When we go out fishing I think most of us want to catch as many fish as possible, the match man to get a good weight and the pleasure angler to go home and say he had a good day.

What I want to do here is explain what I do before I go and when I go to a fishery, but please remember this  is what I do because it works for me, it may work for you.

Firstly where am I going fishing?  I usually decide a few days before, for this example I will pick Damhead Fishery as I think its a good fishery

What fish are in there and what fish do I want to catch

There is a good cross section of fish in there but a good head of 10 to 12 inch Carp, recently stocked (most important )

What I will say first is that no one has ever interviewed a fish to ask what it likes and dis-likes, so it is all guess work and logic.

I want to target these Carp

These recently stocked fish came from a fish farm and been fed on pellets all there life, so will feed on them confidently, they have never seen a maggot or sweetcorn in their life,

So my main bait will be 4 and 6 mm expanded pellets, just soaked over night in water, with a few drops of Betaine liquid. Enough 4mm to use as feed and 6mm for hook bait. Plus I will take as many other types of bait that I can carry in my bag, incase.

So how do I fish? in the summer the fish will be on the feed and active, so a rod and reel with a waggler or other methods would be OK. In the winter I would use a pole and pole float, as the fish would be less active and you could get just nibbling bites which show up better ( but I see no reason why you can’t use a pole float with a rod and reel.)

Finding you depth is important as we all know but I fish only 1” over depth. Setting my depth with a plummet so that the body of the pole float is just under water, then I use small shot to take the float down level with the surface film. You see so many floats that high you could put a flag on them

Quite often I get bites where the float just breaks the surface film but does not go under and there is only one thing that will cause that and that is a fish, so strike.

I make no apologies for this being a bit long but I don’t just sit waiting for a bite, I try to think about what is going on under the water, so I must do a lot of thinking.