Dave Coster's How To- Taking The Red Route

This entry was posted on 1st July, 2019

 



Red is a very effective bait colour; you just need to look at how popular red maggots are! Red groundbaits can be good too, along with red sweetcorn, red boilies and natural baits like redworms. But another area where red has scored particularly well for me is with pellets. Two of my favourite feed pellets are Red Krill and Robin Red, backed up with similar coloured hook offerings. Krill or Robin Red micro pellets are a great way of kick starting a swim, backed up with bigger 4mm sizes for loose feeding. I then use identical coloured soft hook pellets or red maggots to fish over the top.



My red pellet approach opens up a new world on many commercial and day ticket fisheries. Apart from attracting carp, an all-red attack seems to generate lots more interest from other species, such as bream, tench and crucians. I catch my fair share of carp, but in-between bag up with silver fish, making for very hectic sessions. Groundbait is banned on quite a few venues, so the next best thing is feeding micro pellets, which quickly attract lots of interest and keep fish grazing for ages. Micros can be formed into small balls or fed loose in a pole cup, catapulting larger 4mm pellets over them.



The great thing about red pellet fishing, is you don’t need a lot of bait. A third of a bag of micros and the same amount of a 4mm size is normally enough to keep catching all day. I top up the swim occasionally with a small helping of micros and regularly loose feed a few bigger pellets over the top. That’s normally enough to set fish like skimmers fizzing bubbles to the surface, activity which pulls in bigger carp to see what’s going on. Kicking off with red maggots on the hook, without actually feeding any, brings instant bites. I then normally give it an hour before switching to pellet hook baits.



Before the commercial fishery era, there used to be lots of big matches on canals. Back then, a favourite way of guaranteeing a busy day’s fishing was to use bloodworm and joker. These small red midge larvae magically transformed seemingly lifeless swims into match winners. In similar fashion these days, red pellets do the same thing. They activate everything that swims, catching lots of different species you don’t always see with standard brown pellets, or with the super bright hook baits that are used for carp. Red still attracts carp of course, but very often pristine ones that don’t appear to have been caught before.