strangest bait ever used?

[phil a]

Hi Phill welcome to AN,nice to see another cat angler.Not the same Phill A I know from Rackly is it?

 

Hello Budgie. Yes mate, it is I from your Rackley days. Hows things Bud?

[Andy Macfarlane]

He may have been from my part of the world then. Spark plugs are commonly used when fishing rough ground where you expect to lose a few rigs.

 

I used spark plugs for YEARS in my Beach fishing days. It's nothing new in the UK. Spark plugs, bags of wet sand, nuts and bolts....in fact anything. There was no point in fishing some areas with weights. You didn't require any distance so aero bombs were just an expensive waste of time and money.

[DJMCJERICO]

Iv heard of spark plugs, nuts bolts etc being used as weights, the thing i found strange was that his line came off the reel, through the rod, then tied to the spark plug and onto the line, like a fixed bolt rig with no trace, leader etc.

When he got a take he would be pulling the knot of the spark plug at one end and the fish would of been pulling the other

[Dick Dastardly]

I use them as the weight on sunk float paternoster rigs when fishing over rough bottoms on lochs.

[Newt]

I have used them but with a rotten bottom and the weight at the very end of the line.

 

I agree that putting the thing on your mainline with a knot then continuing the mainline down to a hook seems silly.

[Paul Boote]

Weird weights: a great, no-name, Middlesex-based, all-round angler whom I fished with as a tiddler (he's still alive and in his eighties) and from whom I learned much, used as a sea-weight lengths of copper plumbing pipe filled with concrete with a wire loop stuck into the concrete at the top of the weight. Very effective they were.

 

Weird baits: India again. I met an old timer in the the 1970s, a very experienced North Indian Anglo-Indian mahseer-fisher who told me much about Ganges and its huge, fast-flowing canals. Told me of how, in due season, swallows or martins would build their nests in the bridge ironwork and how, in due course, some of their chicks would inevitably fall into the water below. The mahseer knew this and would be stationed below a number of bridges during the nesting season, waiting for a meal. My correspondent told me how his father had taken a shotgun out and shot some sparrows, then used them as bait whilst fishing from a bridge. And they caught.

[corydoras]

LOL @ Fastd.

 

Ivory soap (the white, floating kind) for catfish. Basically my 'bait of last resort' when the channel cats aren't having their usual. Fish it on the bottom as a pop-up.

 

I've posted about it before (this topic occurs every few months) and based on the similarity in eating habits between channels and Wels, I'd bet on it working for your catfish but as far as I can tell, no one has worked up the nerve to try it over there even though it has been a US standard for at least 50 years that I know of.

Hi Newt. I've always meant to as you this, but you soap post has reminded me. What is 'jug fishing'? I know its a catfish technique and that soap is one of the popular baits, but would like to know a bit more.

[Dick Dastardly]

I know about Jug fishing,trot lines etc but will leave it to Newt!

[zedhead]

there was an article from a fairly recent P&P issue where some lads tried pidgeon breasts, rats and pheasant and cought pike and also i remember an article called bangers on the bann, where pike came consistently to sausages where deadbaits all failed.

Personally the wierdest bait ive ever caught on is chreesy watsits, they pop up and have had a few carp on em.

[Woz]

there was an article from a fairly recent P&P issue where some lads tried pidgeon breasts, rats and pheasant and cought pike and also i remember an article called bangers on the bann, where pike came consistently to sausages where deadbaits all failed.

Personally the wierdest bait ive ever caught on is chreesy watsits, they pop up and have had a few carp on em.

 

 

 

On the TV show River Cottage, Hugh Feanley Wotsit(sic) caught a grass carp off the top with sugar puffs!

 

He then went on to eat the carp and funnily enough it tasted of grass!