Roach fishing has always been my first love, and pole fishing my perfected method. I have been fortunate to have won many competitions over the years with some good bags of roach. The most important aspect of any fishing is feeding, and roach fishing is a chosen art. The art of building up a weight is to respond to what level the fish are feeding in the swim, and what size fish are responding.
It is not unnormal for the bigger fish to back off of the feed rather than coming up in the water to intercept bait falling through the water. With that I mean that the bigger fish can respond better to still or stationary baits rather than live baits like maggots, pinkies and squatts. Hemp and caster have proven over the years that they are great feed and catching baits for big bags of red fins.
Darker groundbaits are brilliant when the water gets clearer, and the fish are more cagey than in the summer months. An influx of cooler water takes the natural colour out of the water, and to compensate this it is best to use a dark coloured base mix. Sensas Roach Noir is my favourite as once riddled it produces a air filled fluffy mix that is very user friendly. The mix can be fed loose in shallower water, or squeezed to suit in deeper water.
Bait can also be added ie caster, maggots etc and fed via a pole pot with the groundbait to create a tight feeding area, and then a good weight can be built up. This method lends itself to an ollivette rig with one or two droppers. The ollivette getting the bait down to the killing zone, and then the droppers registering on the float bristle to indicate a bite. I have amassed good weights on bloodworm and joker over groundbait with this type of rig. Venues like the River Lea, Holme Pierepoint and the River Witham are great venues that respond to these rigs and baits.
I enjoyed a great session at Layer Pits some weeks back when the roach were in a very obliging mood. Small fish were abundant and started to come up in the water with constant feed. The roach really responded to cupped in loose groundbait with red maggots inside. I loose fed casters over the top, and was hooking the caster like a maggot for speed. I soon amassed a nice net of roach approaching 20lb on the 12m pole line. A combination of pole and waggler kept the fish coming, the waggler for when the fish moved out of the ole line. The fish soon came back once a pot of groundbait was refed on the pole line.
There are some great autumn/winter roach fishing venues and the fish can really shoal up. With the roach migrating and shoaling up really good weights can be on the cards. Some venues worth checking out at this time of the year are the Old Nene at March, Raveley Drain at Benwick and the River Wellend in the town centre. In fact many short sections with bridges and the fish will shoal up to escape pike and cormorants. Bread Punch becomes popular in the winter, and feeding hemp as a combination produces a deadly attack.
That blog on bread punch fishing will be for another day, see you soon.