Strategic Baiting

Over the last couple of months I have been involved in a very busy film project. Our aim was to produce a movie that covers my fishing at different tricky waters and to give the viewer an insight into my fishing right from the start at every new pool. For the movie I fish three different waters, each of them very different in size and structure and they are all waters which are very new to me. Apart from many other difficulties of the organisation of such a project as finding the right waters and get everyone you need for the job in time my biggest worry was to get fish action in front of the camera. I usually like low stocked pits and tricky waters and for the film being as authentic as possible I did not just want to go to easy waters. So I had to work out extremely good baiting tactics to make sure I could catch a few for the camera when my cameraman and producer came fishing with me. Now this guy did a great job but with his family and his job had very limited time for the filming. However he is a carpfisherman himself and so I thought he would understand if something did not work out the way it was planned for the camera - I shouldn´t have worried though, as everything fell into place far better than I would have been able to imagine before.

The first water we fished is a little muddy lake in a forest with coloured water and very tricky fish. I had only set foot on the banks of that lake twice before I decided it might be a good place for our filming. There are many fish in the lake, about 50 as a guess, with about 10 thirties and two around fourty, a mirror and a common. Being only about 4 acres in size it sounds like being a little paradise, but that´s far from it. This lake gets more pressure then most of the bigger pits we have in our area and with not only carpanglers fishing it but also tenchanglers and pikeanglers all over the place there is nearly no chance to fish it at the weekends but only midweek sessions can be possible. The second problem is the extremely deep mud that covers nearly the whole ground of this water. I haven´t found a rig to work on this ground, not even chodrigs would do the job as everything seems to be covered in mud within minutes of lying on or should I say in the lakebed. The only chance to fish it would be very close to the bank where a very small stretch of gravel allows proper rig presentation.

The fish, being pressured as they are, know their environment very well and once you have caught a fish from close to a bank the area will become dead for hours and you won´t see a fish in it any more. The first time I came to the lake I realised how most anglers were fishing close to their own bank under their rod tips. This is not ideal, I thought, because you play a hooked fish over your baited area whereas if you cast to the opposite bank of the lake you could get a hooked fish away from your baited area very quickly hopefully not disturbing the other carp there too much. The problem is that it is an extremely difficult cast to the opposite banks because you almost have to hit the bank to get a perfect drop. I thought it shouldn´t be too much of a problem though and had my first ever cast at the new water (with no line clip of course...) Kabosh! And the rig hit the bank at the other side of the lake. The lead had found it´s way into the soft grass bottom and there was no way of pulling it out from where I was standing. It was getting dark and started to rain, nightmare situation, I can tell you. I grabbed a few boilies and went round to the other side of the lake. I managed to pull the rig out of the mud on the bank, checked the line and hook, they still looked good, and then I just dropped the rig into the water onto the little gravel stretch into the coloured water, just a few inches from the bank. I went back round to my rod and when I arrived the clutch was spinning and I lifted the rod into what felt like a very heavy fish - to cut a long story short, after about twenty minutes I netted the biggest fish in the lake at a topweight of over 44 lbs. Now this little gravel stretch seemed to be just the spot and as it stretches almost all around the little lake I made up a plan for my future sessions. I would bait up many different spots all around the lake and everywhere I would bait up close to the bank. Now this water doesn´t allow locating fish as you usually would by watching out for rolling or jumping fish as the fish very rarely stick their heads out of the water but there is a little trick that I could use to locate them as due to the muddy ground of the water the fish would always colour the water very much at the spots they were feeding at. Even on the gravely spots there is a thin layer of mud covering them. Also, whenever I walked around the lake I could see the fish bo waving away from the very shallow spots. I would then concentrate on the spots that I saw the colouring in the water and fish waving away when I arravided and little by little I formed a plan in my head which spots to bait up more heavily and which spots not to bait at all any more.

The one thing I did not like was that I was obviously baiting up for everyone else as well but as most people at this water fish single hookbaits and don´t bait up at all I thought it to be well worth giving the fish some trust in my boilies. I came back to fish the water for a German magazine feature about rigs  and caught a few up to 25 pounds. No monsters but I was happy. When me and my cameraman arrived for filming a session a few weeks ago I had already prepared a few spots as explained and everything went right with a few nice fish, again up to 25 pounds. I still had not caught the second biggest fish of the lake, in fact I hadn´t even caught any of the thirties it holds, so I went back with the camera and this time I really went mad. Being early September at the time I prepared only one spot but with 8kg of Nutrabaits high nutritional value boilies per day. The baits were also rolled to my own receipe with a lot of garlic oil and a few other little goodies from Nutrabaits. I was also using huge quantities of the Nutrabaits Specialist bag mix as I thought it would pull fish in from the whole lake simulating feeding fish because of the colouring of the water. I believe that sound can travel under water, especially in a shallow lake like this little lake and so I rolled the eggshells into the boilies giving them a crunsh effect. I also introduced a few bright coloured baits just to try something different in the muddy water and then I kept all this going in every day for about a week, not fishing the area at all. Fortunately, most of the regulars knew me at that point and despite thinking I was becoming a bit crazy with my hunt for the biguns they knew I was preparing the spot for my filming and left the area unfished for these few days. A huge thanks there! When the day was finally there I cast two rods to the spot, mind you, clipping up this time, getting perfect doncs! I set behind the rods all night and just as the doubts were starting to set in and I was starting to ask myself if I had overdone it with the bait the left hand rod rattled off. I lifted the rod and fought for about half an hour with a very slow swimming fish. Eventually I got it into the net and by the time it was just starting to dawn and I could see what I had caugh: The big common and at 39 lbs the second biggest fish in the lake. I even recast the rod and caught another one, a mirror this time of over 32 lbs. I was over the moon and we had great footage for the movie.

The second lake I wanted to fish for the movie is very different to the little lake in the forest. It´s a huge gravel pit of approximately 30 acres with only about 50 known fish, all proper carp and with a lake record of about 40 lbs. At least, that´s the information I could get when I started fishing it. I knew this lake from my very early days as a perch and roach angler. Back then as a little kid I also caught a carp here and there but then I left the lake and came back about ten years later. I wanted to get to know the lake a bit last year and set up for a social session with a friend. We prepared 3 spots and put the rods out. The first run of my second night at the water then turned out to be the biggest fish in the lake, a mirror of over 50 lbs and at this top weight a new lake record. Of course I was happy but at the same time I felt a bit embarrassed as I knew that this was a fish that my good friend Dirk had been trying to catch for years.

Fortunately he then caught it a few weeks later himself. I had only had a lucky punch with this fish and with Dirk being the guy who fishes this lake week after week I know that he was the one to talk to for my filming project. He arranged the possibility of filming at the water and I started thinking about a baiting tactic. One thing I have often found with these low stocked gravel pits is that it´s very difficult to hold the fish in one certain area. To me it seems like all you can do is give them a proper meal right where you can find them and if they like it they will come back to the spot on their next tour through the lake. It has to be nice food though because in low stocked pits like this a fish can stick its head down everywhere and feed with almost no competition so I feel you have to offer them something special. Before we actually started filming at the gravel pit I went to my home water, a huge pit of around 80 acres and also relatively low stocked. A few huge commons live in this lake and one of them has been my target fish for over two years now, hopefully, some day she will be mine... At this huge water again I have often found that you need to bait up right where you can find the fish and I prepared my bait for this water in a very special way. First I gave it a squeeze of Multimino which should cover the baits a bit and give a nice food signal. Then I squeezed a lot of Liquid Kelp into the bait bag, giving the baits a unique and dark look and taste. I caught a lot of nice fish at my difficult big bit and with the right confidence in the baiting tactic I then went back to the 30 acres gravel pit to start preparing the spots for the filming session. Dirk was with me and together we put the bait in at five different spots all over the lake. It was going to the end of September so we really gave them a bit, around 6 or 7 kilos of bait per spot. We prepared shallow spots close to a sailing club, deeper spots at pleteaus which Dirk had found with the echo sounder and close to old weedbeds. Filming time came round at the end of the week and Dirk had arranged us a swim from which we could cover a huge part of the lake with our rods. We rowed the rigs out with the boat and set back for a conversation about low stocked waters in front of the camera when the first rod came into life. Dirk took the rod, my producer and cameraman Jascha went onboard and they got some great footage of a thirty pounder being played in front of the camera.

I was up next and Jascha joined me to film a nice mid twenty being played and netted from the boat. The carp really went mad and over the weekend we caught 6 fish between us if memory serves me right and all this at a water where 6 fish in a year is a nice result. Job done I thought and while I was doing the "end of the session moderation" for the camera, my thoughts were already focused on the last and biggest challenge for the film. A big gravel pit again, but this time very weedy and very pressured. I have started to trickle some bait in and we will start filming there soon. If it all works out in a good way, we will finish our filming in mid November and the film shall be ready to hit the shops in spring 2010. Well, as you might expect, we did the whole filming in German and the film is thought to be released for the German market early 2010. However, I would love to produce an English version, I´ll keep you up to date, especially with my fishing results I hope.

All the best,

Philipp Braun