Hi everyone, ....did ya miss me?....nah? oh well thought not....anyway, I've heard many people talking about building up a swim. And more than regularly chucking in a few maggots , I'm completly lost. How'd you go about it. lots of groundbait? lots of food? Iknow your supposed to get the fish into a feeding frenzy, I just don't really know how to do it and i reckon that that may have a lot to do with my poor history of full keepnets. more than ten fish in a day is as rare with me as rocking horse manure. I feel like I'm in the dark about this one so any help would be very gratefully recieved , thank you

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Frodo - look at it this way. If you were in a classroom full of kids and threw a whole bag of sweets at the front, there'll be a brief fight, the sweets will be gone and it will be all over..... However if you throw five or six sweets every 5-10mins you keep the interest going the whole session!

true enough I suppose, but we're back to throwing a few maggots in at regular intervals....It just seems theres so much more to it. I mean...what if there not feeding do you still chuck i loose offerings? will those offerings remain on the bottom till they start to feed again, and if so, will it have piled up so high that they all eat there fill and stop eating again? someone the otherday on another site when I was asking about whips, suggested using one of the new power whips on the river and then changing to stick float or wagggler "when your swim builds up". It sounds fine in theory its just that in practice its never been my experience that that happens. So I can only conclude I'm doing something very wrong.
I get the principle but I do not have the Know how :confused:

Frodo - I wouldn't worry too much about offerings piling up as that is nigh impossible.
Even if you are not getting bites, if you were underwater you would see that there are hundreds of small (and some not so small!)fish, happily waiting for more free offerings. That is why I believe that you must start of on the bottom (even laying on), and then shortening the depth by an inch every 20 or so minutes, until you begin to get bites.

[ 09. July 2004, 09:47 PM: Message edited by: kleinboet ]

Ah-haaa now maybe i'm entering another learning curve.

quote:

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you must start of on the bottom (even laying on), and then shortening the depth by an inch every 20 or so minutes, until you begin to get bites.

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thats something I've come across a couple of times as well and something I do not do. (mainly because I do not understand the theory behind it).
If your getting bites from the off would you still shorten ? If they were not feeding at all how short would you go? And why would you do this?
Sorry for all the questions but like I said this is an area that I feel I have been going massivly wrong in and as you can see am very ignorant in this part of the sport :confused: .

If you getting bites from the off, then you are where the fish are and shortening is not neccessary, however, if you do get "bites" and not feel any fish when you hit, you may be getting "line bites." The reasoning behind shortening your line is that fish change the depth where they swim according to a number of reasons, which I won't go into here. They will rarely leave their depth to take your bait.
In other words you have to find where the fish are and then bag up. Remember, you won't catch fish if they are not there to take your bait.

I have full sympathy with you Frodo. I find exactly the same thing, on the river at least. First cast I get a small dace. Then I get a couple of roach. Then I get in a tangle, and stop feeding for 10 minutes and lose the plot completely, and find it hard to build it up again.

In still water it works more like the books say. Sometimes there are no bites for the first 30 minutes, and then my groundbait works and the fish arrive and it all happens.

I don't know what goes wrong in rivers. Maybe I spook them? Maybe I'm not persistent enough? I did try one thing last year, though, that worked. If I'm fishing with maggot and get a succession of really small fish I don't normally stay there for more than 10 minutes. But someone insisted that if i carried on better fish would arrive. So I stuck at it in an area full of small ones and decided to catch as many as I could, if only to prove the theory wrong. In a couple of hours I caught 50 fish, and it's perfectly true that in the last half hour I was getting slightly better roach and was into a few half pound perch. But I guess I'm not really a maggot man, because I can't help thinking I'd have done better if I'd resorted to a bigger bait - but that's another debate, I know.

Just to whet your appetite

Sorry, here it is



[ 09. July 2004, 10:42 PM: Message edited by: kleinboet ]

Do you think groundbait is essental in all of this? because I hardly ever use it and , honestly I'm never really convinced by its effectiveness over free offerings. and also if the fish are not on the bottom and the grounbait is again I don't see the point?
Is it also fair to assume that if your fishing for bream or tench or barbel there always going to be on the bottom?