Carp In The Margins

I am happy as a pig in mud if, in the Summer, I find myself drawing a swim with a decent margin to attack. I love this method of fishing and will happily spend a whole match targeting the shallow water if I can.

There are two bits of kit that I consider essential if you are serious about margin fishing. I always carry a weedcutter and a pair of secateurs. Each year I am amazed that come late Summer I fish swims that have margins that are screaming out to be fished yet it is obvious no-one has. Ten minutes gardening can make a margin swim fishable. Trust me, it is worth the effort. Even if it has been fished previously I find that it may still need some tidying up. It is also worth investing in a cheap telescopic landing net handle for your weedcutter. You do not want your take apart handle coming apart when cutting some stubborn reeds leaving the top section out of reach or sinking into the lake.

You have to take care plumbing up. Ideally I am looking for a depth of between one and two and a half foot of water close to the bank. Obviously different lakes have different margin profiles, they can vary even from swim to swim and left and right of your platform. So like the gardening its worth taking time over. I have had some very successful days when the margin shelf was just four inches wide. I will also look to see if there are a number of spots I can fish with the same margin rig. The more the merrier for me. I will rotate around four or five spots to find where a fish is feeding. As I catch from one spot I will feed that spot next put in and then switch the float to another spot. If there's no indication of fish in the spot with two or three minutes I move on.

You don't always need bankside cover. I have often been surprised that the better response has come from a bare bank as opposed to a spot with vegitation or a bush overhanging the water. You have to keep an open mind and try everything. Also you may not need to be tight to the bank. On some swims the margin shelf may extend a couple of feet. Sometimes the bigger fish will hang back from the bank and the feed. Again, dob around and see what response you get. If you can find a bigger stamp of fish then great, your weight will build faster.

Not all margin bites will be sail-aways. I have known days when I have had to dot the float down, shorten the distance to the pole tip and lift at every dip. But other days you just wait for the float to zoom off and the elastic follows. Happy days those.

There are some venues I fish where I know that the margins will produce from the start. Hence on these I see no point in making life complicated by fishing for very long elsewhere. But this doesn't mean that fishing the margins is simple. You may think that all you need to do is dump some bait in and the fish will start climbing up the line, not so. As with most forms of fishing you have to work out the best approach on the day to maximise the swim's potential. A match in July 2013 is a perfect example.

Peg 14 on Decoy Lake's Cedar pool was my spot for the day. This is a corner peg on one of Decoy's strip lakes. The corner is to the right about eight metres away but at not much more than two metres the bank has eroded to form a small bowl about two foot across. This is where the overflow pipe is buried and the backfilled bank has eroded in time to make this inviting hole of about eighteen inches deep. I chose that as my main line plus another back-up to my left fishing about four foot out, top kit plus one section of pole away where the severe margin slope ends. This line would be fed heavily all day. A tactic demonstrated to me by Bob Nudd just a few weeks earlier during a day's fishing I had with him as a raffle prize on one of the other strip lakes (Yew) at Decoy. That day I had around 120 pound with fish to eight pound.

I started the match feeding micros by hand into the margin to the right and handfuls of four mil. Pellets to the deep swim to the left every couple of minutes. Although I soon had fish in the margin I found them difficult to catch and after an hour had only four fish in the net. I decided that throwing, while convenient, spread the feed too far and so switched to feeding the micros via a tosspot. The result was magical. I was soon getting plenty of bites and fish.

I think that by concentrating the feed on a small spot meant that the fish coming into the swim had only one spot to feed on and find my hookbait. Previously they were grubbing all over the place and not being homed into the spot I was fishing. I was putting in a tosspot of micros after every fish.

Whenever the margin swim went quiet I re-fed and left it while trying the left hand deep swim. This produced some fish of a bigger stamp and kept the weight building while resting the margin. I ended the match with 124 pound and second place. The winner had 146 pound, so that quiet first hour cost me, or looked at another way, over the six hours of the match I was just under four pound an hour behind, in essence one fish an hour.

While my favourite feed for the margins is micros I have to be adaptable and flexible if that approach doesn't work. There are days when the fish want corn or four mil. pellets. Sometimes cupped in, others thrown in in large volume by hand to create a bed. Similarly with hookbait, you need a selection and you must swap around even once you are catching in case the tastes change during the day. So I will always go with corn, four and six mil. expanders, hard pellet and meat. I rarely take maggot but if the venue is known to respond to them then there will be some in my bag. Paste of course can help sort out the larger fish.

On the subject of feeding – tosspots. I carry around twenty of various sizes so I can adjust the feed depending on the way the fish react. I make them myself out of any small light cup such as you get on drinks bottles, tops of Pritt sticks or aerosols etc. I punch two holes in the side about a centimetre apart, thread on a short length of waste elastic and tie into a loop. The elastic wraps around the pole tip and over the cup so the cup sits on the side of the pole. They can be changed quickly without having to remove the rig and don't damage the pole.

 

Another match on Decoy, this time on Horseshoe lake in August 2013 showed the difference what I feed can make. This was my first match after a serious medical problem and so I wasn't going to do anything complicated and may also explain my slow response to what wasn't working.

I drew peg 2, luckily a short walk. This peg has an inviting margin just top kit distance to the left and close to the bank just twenty inches deep, plenty for me to be confident fish would feed there. Again because of the distance I fed micros by hand and one fish showed up very quickly. But I didn't get a bite in the swim for four hours, a nightmare. Even switching to feeding the micros in a pot didn't improve the situation. With forty pound in the net from my backup line and two hours to go I changed the feed in the margin to just a few grains of corn and a small amount of micros. Very soon large fish started to show and with 90 minutes to go I hooked and landed a seven pound carp. This was followed by three at five pounds and several more smaller fish. Final weight 103 pound and fourth in the match only six pound off second.

It may have been the change in feed or it may have been a timing thing. I tend to favour the change of feed theory because the response to the change was rapid and obvious.

My margin rigs are as simple as I can make them. I prefer a float with a bristle so the BGT1 from Buygoodtackle.com* is ideal. I use the 0.2g size and shot that with two No.6 shot just above the 10 ten inch hooklength. I have taken to adding a spring eye just to protect the side eye.

Mainline is Reflo Power 0.17. Hooklength will either be 0.17 Reflo to a size 18 Fox Match Carp 2 (sadly no longer available thanks to Ricky Teal, but I stocked up) or 0.13 to a Kamasan B611 size 16. I have found the yellow Preston 16 solid to be a good elastic. I don't use pullas. I also have some 18-20 solid for days when the fish need a bit more control.

Margin fishing isn't always easy, needs fathoming out and can work for the entire match, not just the last hour as some will maintain. Get it right and even with a slow start you can put together a framing or winning weight very quickly.

One final example. I won't name the fishery as I wish to keep my advantage should I ever return, but its somewhere I have only fished twice. First time I picked peg 21 and by the end of the match had worked out that the most productive spot was in the margins where I was catching a mixture of carp and chub to 3lb. This is despite there being some very inviting other spots in the swim. Because of my late discovery I just missed out on the section win.

A year later I drew peg 20. As I set my box down I could hear others around me moaning about this section of the lake having been included in the pegging. I was rubbing my hands at this and it was one of the few occasions I knew before the start I would do well, certainly well enough to win my section, possibly well enough to frame.

The platform only just reached past the bankside rushes to my right and to my left you couldn't see the margin for some adjacent greenery. Ten minutes with the secateurs saw the greenery reduced in hight and the bare bank margin visible. The rushes to the right just needed some drooping leaves cutting out with the weedcutter. All I would need to the right was a topkit, to the left topkit plus two to three sections. I spent the match taking carp & chub from no more than three foot to my right and up against the bare bank to my left. I won the section and was sixth overall (forty fishing). And that from a section no-one wanted to draw.

* In case you wonder. I am not sponsored by BGT (or anyone else). I am just a customer who likes the floats plus the service and price are excellent. I mention them solely so you can go on the website and see the floats if you wish.

 

http://www.buygoodtackle.com/Floats.html