After a great many years of angling I have picked up quite a lot of tips and ideas to help me fish m
ore effectively.
This week I will mention some of those ideas in the hope that some readers may benefit from them.
Tip one: When waiding in rivers that may have slippery beds anglers find it handy to use a wading staff. When I fished rivers a lot I found that it was a very good idea to use my landing net shaft as a wading staff and thus avoid struggling to use both nets and staffs at the same time.
You can tie a length of cord to the net to stop it drifting away in the current when not in use.
Tip two: Many fisheries insist on the use of barbless hooks. It is difficult to use live baits without them wriggling off the hook.
You can now buy lifelike artificial maggots that look and even smell like real maggots. Slip one or two of these on your hook after mounting a real worm or maggots first and the artificial keeps the real bait on the hook.
Tip three: When using hair rigs to mount baits like boilies or meat on a hair near the hook, it can be a fiddly job trying to fit the hair stop through the loop that you have made in the end of the nylon or braid hair, especially when the loop is wet. First tie a two millimetre steel ring onto the end of the hair and it then becomes easy to insert the hair stop.
Tip four: If you like the ever-growing trend for fishing with artificial flies for pike, instead of using a wire trace next to your hook to prevent bite offs, try braiding three strands of seven-pound nylon together and whip this braided trace onto your hook before tying the fly or lure in the hook.
Even if two strands get bitten through you still stand a good chance of landing the pike on the remaining strand.
Tip five: I have caught a lot of fish using cheese for bait either on the hook or on a hair rig over the years. I found that by far the most productive kind of cheese bait was pieces from those sliced, processed cheeses that are not very nice to eat but very attractive to the fish and just the right consistency to make a bait that stays on the hook but allows the hook to penetrate.
John Neville
