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Tag Archives: maggots

Spombing maggots by the gallon for Tench & Bream

Andrew's PB bream - 7lb 15oz - Higham Farm

After our fairly successful session at Higham Farm last year, Shane and I decided on a return trip this Spring, again for 24 hours and again targeting the resident tench. Shane had hatched a plan of attack and I liked it.  I really liked it.  This time we would fish on the Specimen Lake, which can only be fished on a 24 hour ticket.  Because of this, it tends to only attract carp anglers so the numerous other species resident in the lake only ever see the bank when they pick up a disgruntled carper’s bait!  Specimen tench and bream were definitely on the cards, plus who knows what large roach and perch could lurk in there. Besides fishing this lake, our approach was a little unorthodox too.  Rather than simply using scaled-back carp tactics, we would go armed with a couple of gallons of maggots each and fish positively by feeding aggresively – by introducing a large bed of maggots via a spomb, then topping the swims up when necessary. I chose to hair rig a mixture of buoyant Drennan imitation maggots and live maggots to create a balanced Medusa bait designed to hover just above the lake bed, …

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The Sweet Smell of Success – Roach Fishing with Sweet Baits

Andrew Kennedy with his new parsonal-best Roach

Roach fishing is something I very seldom do, in fact I cannot remember the last time I set out to specifically catch roach, except maybe to use as pike baits! Unsurprisingly, my roach PB has never been anything to shout about; I don’t know exactly what my biggest roach was, but it was certainly below 1lb. The positive of this was that there’s a lot of room left for improvement! Through the grapevine I heard of a local day ticket water which had produced a few large roach to pleasure anglers over the summer months. It was time to try for my first big roach and this seemed the perfect place to start. I remembered reading an article last year about the virtues of flavouring maggots with super-sweet flavours such as scopex, in helping to tempt winter roach to feed. So I got hold of some strong scopex bait spray and sprayed this onto my maggots, twice a day, for two days prior to the session. The smell was unbelievable! Despite being sealed in a large bucket inside the shed, you could smell scopex in the garden with the shed door shut! I met up with my good friend Kevin …

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