Boilies and bolt rigs for big chub

[BobH]

Tigger

 

If my health improves I'm sure I will have a go for the Chub this Winter, I have a few other challenges I would like to achieve, such as a double figure Zander from the Lea, but those chub always draw me back.

 

My first 7lb Chub was caught in 2002, so it took a long time to get to the monsters, Simon never lost sight of how hard the task was and without his enthusiasm for the species I'm sure I would not have put in so much time.

 

In the Osprey book, Simon and I detail some other species we targeted and the efforts we went to achieve our ambitions, along with contributions from other anglers who had similar ambitions.

 

All profits going to Cancer Research UK

 

http://www.calmproductions.com/

 

Bob

Edited October 3, 2014 by BobH

[Anderoo]

Bob, do you think boilies are intrinsically a better bait for really big chub, or do you use them mainly because of other factors (e.g. the crays)?

 

How do you bait up when using boilies for bait (both prebaiting and when fishing)? How long do you usually expect to wait for a bite?

 

I understand there are 'known' swims on these bits of the Lea, how transient do you think the big fish generally are? Do you think they'd be as transient as they are without the fishing pressure in the known swims?

 

Final question(!), when you fish with boilies, do you always then also use a bolt rig?

 

I've never fished the Lea and only get little glimpses of the chub fishing there from other people, so it's likely that my perception of it is quite different from the reality. I have fished the Thames quite a bit in recent years which shares in some of the Lea's characteristics (lots of crayfish, stretches where there are few fish but a good average size, although not up to Lea standards!) and have often wondered what my results would be like if I tried a boilie/bolt rig approach. I did try a boilie paste approach but failed miserably, which I put down to errors in baiting/prebaiting. I just couldn't get it to work, and eventually gave up on it.

[BobH]

Anderoo, on 03 Oct 2014 - 09:56, said:

Bob, do you think boilies are intrinsically a better bait for really big chub, or do you use them mainly because of other factors (e.g. the crays)?

 

How do you bait up when using boilies for bait (both prebaiting and when fishing)? How long do you usually expect to wait for a bite?

 

I understand there are 'known' swims on these bits of the Lea, how transient do you think the big fish generally are? Do you think they'd be as transient as they are without the fishing pressure in the known swims?

 

Final question(!), when you fish with boilies, do you always then also use a bolt rig?

 

I've never fished the Lea and only get little glimpses of the chub fishing there from other people, so it's likely that my perception of it is quite different from the reality. I have fished the Thames quite a bit in recent years which shares in some of the Lea's characteristics (lots of crayfish, stretches where there are few fish but a good average size, although not up to Lea standards!) and have often wondered what my results would be like if I tried a boilie/bolt rig approach. I did try a boilie paste approach but failed miserably, which I put down to errors in baiting/prebaiting. I just couldn't get it to work, and eventually gave up on it.

Anderoo

 

A number of questions, which I will answer one by one.

 

Q/. Do you think boilies are intrinsically a better bait for really big chub, or do you use them mainly because of other factors (e.g. the crays)?

 

A/. Firstly, Chub are ubiquitous in their choice of foods, they eat everything and anything, so I don't think boilies are any better a bait for chub than anything else you can offer them, be they big or small Chub you are targeting.

But boilies and hard pellets certainly lend themselves to a baiting campaign on waters where you have crayfish or mitten crabs to contend with, although my first choice of bait for chub, would be bread followed by chees paste, if you do not have crayfish in the venue you are fishing.

 

Q/. How do you bait up when using boilies for bait (both prebaiting and when fishing)? How long do you usually expect to wait for a bite ?

 

A/. That's a good question, over the years, Simon and I found we had to select a boilie flavour the Chub liked, originally we used a bait made by D.T. Baits called M-Tech, but unfortunately some of the ingredients became impossible to source and the bait was no longer available.

Later we went over to All Season Bait Developments who's owner Kevin Wilkinson use to work for D.T.s and started producing a number of baits that fitted the bill for what we were looking for in a chub bait.

As already mentioned, Crayfish are part of the River Lea's Chub staple diet and we looked for a bait that had a similar flavour to that of Crayfish, which meant we had to eat a lot of Crayfish, which to us tasted a lot like Salmon ?

Kevin made a fishmeal based boilie which used a Salmon flavour, Simon and I had successfully used this boilie for the Lea's carp the previous summer and were happy that it would attract Chub in a similar way.

We ask Kevin to lower the flavour rate slightly as we found that over flavoured baits tended to lower the bite rate and we also upped the egg album to increase the hardness of the baits.

20mm baits were our preferred size and the hook baits were air dried, solely to deter the attentions of the crayfish, keeping a bait in the water a bit longer can be the difference between a good night and a bad one.

Once we settled on an area that we felt may hold a few Chub, we would start baiting the area regularly, this was always done at the end of a session and would be on the areas we intended to fish.

These areas might be quite small, a few square meters or larger areas where we knew the chub congregated, Simon and I disagreed about the amount of free bait to use, I would always put in about 2kg, Simon put in less, possibly half this amount.

And we would always use a small PVA bag of whole boilies and a few broken boilies of the same flavour to the hook bait (Salmon) hooked onto the hook before casting out (it also helped with tangles of the hooklink), plus I used a Salmon Paste moulded into the gripper lead to help with the attraction to the baits.

In the 2012/13 winter season we reckoned about ever 4th trip we got a bite, between us we were doing about 3 evening trips a week, these were from around mid afternoon to maybe midnight.

But we knew we had our best chance ever of catching the monster we so desired and so it proved.

 

Q/. I understand there are 'known' swims on these bits of the Lea, how transient do you think the big fish generally are ? Do you think they'd be as transient without the fishing pressure in the known swims ?

 

A/. I believe the Lea Chub are extremely transient, they have a lot of water to swim in and they move around a great deal, Neill Steven's caught his river record from the LAA section of the old river, it was caught twice more that season from the stretch above, in the Kings Weir section, both parts of the river see lots of angling pressure and bait.

I saw that Chub back in the LAA section the following closed season (May) near to an area that is know for the spawning of Chub and Barbel, but the following winter; Simon caught the same Chub at 8lbs 14ozs in the Relief Channel which I reckon is approximately 4 miles from the LAA section.

It is my understanding that that chub had not been caught since it's capture in the Kings Weir section of river a year or so previously and who knows where it might have been in between, so my answer to this question, is yes they are very transient !!

Which is why they seem so difficult to locate.

 

Q/. Final question(!), when you fish with boilies, do you always then use a bolt rig?

 

A/. 99.9% of time I use a bolt rig with boilies, but it's more to do with the hooking arrangement than the boilie, both Simon and I spent a lot of time experimenting with hair length and we came to the same conclusion that very short hairs high up the shank of the hook were the best way attaching a boilie to the hair.

Big Chub are notoriously difficult to hook in normal circumstances and the number of dropped runs in the early years of our chub fishing were too numerous to mention, it took years of experimenting to get it right and in the book I detail another little tweak that I believe aided hooking, Simon would have none of it and kept to the original concept.

The 0.1% has to be the 8lb 9ozs Chub I caught whilst fishing upstream, with a very light running lead, a shortish hooklink and a Mugga hook, the hair below the bend of the hook, this would be my Barbel Set up, but I managed to hook and land that Chub by striking a drop back type of bite.

 

So nothing is a given when Chub fishing.

 

The Carp pictures below were caught from Landridge the previous summer, that is the pit which has the Relief Channel running through it, they were caught on the same type of flavoured boilie (All Season Baits Developments "Salmon") which accounted for all our big Chub.

Simon details his captures of Carp from this pit in The Osprey Specimen and Friends book.

 

Bob

Edited October 8, 2014 by BobH

[Anderoo]

Very interesting, thanks Bob.

 

Re the baiting, I think that's where I went wrong with the boilie paste idea, simply not enough bait. 2 kg of boilies in a few small areas several times a week is pretty significant. Do you think this was a really key aspect to it all?

[JV44]

Bob were they a high flavcour impact type bait or just 2kg of something you trusted to get them used to feeding in those areas ?? did you get may barbell as a by catch??

[BobH]

Anderoo

 

If you can cast your mind back to the winter of 2012/13, it was terrible, very cold and very wet, as a result there were floods every where and the Flood Relief Channel was in Full Flood (as befitting it's name)for much of the time.

Because of this I used more boilies than I would normally to hold the Chub in that area of the Relief Channel (many of the freebee's washed away), Simon disagreed, because he thought it would fill up the Chub and they would depart the area, but that did not happen.

There were three of us fishing the same area of the Channel and we held the Chub in the same section for three months, in the past it would have been called pyramid baiting, but works if applied properly.

We caught Chub from 3lbs to 9lbs and every thing in between, I lost a huge Chub at the net, but made up the loss with my "9", I will never forget those few months and the friendship Simon and I had.

The baiting was only part of our success, we knew the Relief Channel well, the rigs had been fine tuned to reduce dropped pick up's, the tackle was adequate for the conditions, the really cold weather reduced Crayfish activity and we had a boilie that we knew worked well.

I believe it's never one thing, it's always a combination to catch consistently.

 

Bob

Edited October 4, 2014 by BobH

[BobH]

Bob were they a high flavcour impact type bait or just 2kg of something you trusted to get them used to feeding in those areas ?? did you get may barbell as a by catch??

JV44

 

No they were lower in Salmon flavour than the bait we used in the summer for the Carp, the Base fishmeal mix has a distinctive favour and we had found in previous years, that the Chub were put off by over flavoured baits.

 

We had glugs of the Salmon flavour which we would use on the Air Dried Baits if they lacked any smell, but to be honest most of the time they worked okay and there was no need to glug them.

 

Bob

[JV44]

Slightly off topic but one of the carp chaps I bump into on the Thames has caught a lot of big Chub as accidental captures whilst after carp and his boilies were more based on taste than smell which got me thinking lots of peeps get boilies out of a glug pot and say smell this [the boilie][ the fish love it but I guess in the water its all about taste??? can smell spread through water Steve

[Anderoo]

Thanks Bob.

 

If crays weren't so much of a problem, would you be as confident fishing for those chub with mashed bread and flake, or cheesepaste?

 

Or is part of the reason to use boilies that you're waiting a long time for a bite and want to use bolt rigs, and boilies are an easier bait to use with that method? The method dictating the bait rather than the other way around?

[BobH]

JV44

 

Smell, taste and scent, it's an interesting observation, we use to vary the boiling time of the boilie to allow quicker/slower flavour release and of course hardness of the outer case of the boilie.

 

Bob