Working Hard For Them… Rob Shanks

This entry was posted on 22nd July, 2013

Working Hard For Them… Rob Shanks

Over the later part of May my fishing really slowed up. I’d been catching consistently but work and family life started to take its toll with me having a full two weeks away from the banks of the syndicate lake. I managed a couple of small twenties around the end of May, a 22.04 linear and a repeat capture of the ghost carp I had in April slightly up in weight at 20.04 this time around. But all in all my mind hadn’t been fully in the game, by the end of  month things started to settle back to normal and I found my brain drifting back to thoughts of all things fishy. Over the last few months I have some good success but I’ve had too work extremely hard for them!

Over this period of time I’ve had to contend with quite a few challenges that have made the fishing particularly hard and I’ve had to get my thinking cap on to try and over come them. Rather than give a blow by blow account of my sessions I’ve decided to talk about the biggest issue I’ve come across recently, nuisance fish, more specifically big Roach and a few of the changes I made to over come them. These little critters as beautiful as they are have been making it extremely difficult to fish for the carp that I’ve been trying to target. Not only have they being destroying my hook baits and eating all the freebies I’ve been introducing, but they have been causing havoc with my well balanced presentations so by employing just a couple of simple tactic’s the impact has been dramatically reduced and my catch rate has ticked along nicely.

This time of year I like to fish hard on the deck, don’t get me wrong I love the chod rig through the cooler periods of the year where there’s lot’s of bottom debris and I want my hook bait to be visual buy popping it up, but as soon as the warmer months are upon us I prefer to fish on the bottom. I recently swapped my usual ESP striptease presentation over to a stiff ESP Ghost presentation. The idea being that the stiffness of the 18lb fluorocarbon makes it’s a lot more difficult for the small fish to manipulate into there mouths and avoids the issue of the rig tangling and resetting it’s self. The rig was tid knotless knot style with the stiff fluorocarbon also as the hair but I fish this long than usual as to keep a good degree of separation between hook and bait and the set up is completed with a simple shrink tube kicker to help the ESP long shank hook turn into a hooking position even more effectively when sucked in by a big hungry carp. I can cast this rig out safe in the knowledge that the rig is out there fishing not tied up in knots or sitting up of the bottom.



The second part and probably the hardest to get your head round is bait. I have regularly reeled in baitless hair’s and I started getting extremely paranoid about whether the traps I’d set to trip a wary carp had been completely cleaned out by a hungry shoal of bait stealing red fin’s. I’ve been using Sticky Baits awesome krill which is extremely soluble, which is a big part of its success, but consequencely goes soft in water very quickly which I think has been intensifying the problem. By simply preparing it and taking special care with my hook baits it’s all but elevated the problem.

The first thing I take care of is the hook bait’s, I meshed these up with a small piece of ladies tight, which is held in place with a bait floss knot and blobbed and secured further with the flame from a lighter. This has made sure that the roach can’t whittle the baits away and steal them off the hairs but doesn’t effect the bait by having to harden it; it allows it to break down and pump out all its attractors as designed, I then keep them in a mix of 50/50 Sticky Bait’s Krill liquid and Krill glug. To make sure my freebies aren’t being polished off to quickly I take a couple of steps to harden them up. The first part of the process is to air dry them for at least a few weeks, this removes a lot of the moisture and the baits will dry out as hard as marbles. To stop the intake of water once immersed I glug them up for a few days in Sticky Baits CAP oil which really does prolong there life in water and adds extra attraction to the dehydrated boilies. These simple changes have made a massive difference to how effectively I’m fishing and I’m sure they have put me a few more carp on the bank.



Robs Tackle Box:

Daiwa Basia QD Trakker Cayman Bivvy ESP Soft Ghost ESP Raptor Long Shank ESP Camo Sink Link