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* Sometimes your conventional rigs and baits lose their ‘edge,’ and your catches start to slow down. So what can you do instead to keep those big fish getting hooked? Here are a few well proven alternative ideas for you to really benefit from. Firstly, you could combine pepperoni sausage or luncheon meat, with a boilie on one or two ‘hairs’ on your hook. Even making up a simple paste dough, with perhaps blue cheese and yeast extract with semolina and eggs, with amino acids body building supplements added, could well be a winner. Use this bait as a long sausage on a long hair. Add a few small beads on the ‘hair’ and a couple fixed slightly above the hook to hold the paste on. With this bait the hook will be taken into the mouth complete with bait, and the soft nature of the dough paste makes it more than likely you will hook the fish, especially if the hook is a large one like a size 4 or even a size 2. One famous alternative along this kind of principle is the ‘Greedy pig’ type rig: Use multiple baits on one long hair. This could be boilies, pellets, or any combination at all. I have use a version very successfully: I have used a string of 6 or 7 tiny boiled baits of around 8 millimetres in diameter. These small boiled baits sit on the hair behind the shank of the hook and not off the bend as is usual. The hair is tied onto the hook link just above the hook and ends tied to the back of the bend of the hook forming a loop. Again when this is picked up, the hook is actually adjacent to the baits and is very likely to enter the mouth, turn and hook the fish. The first time I used this version it hooked one of the biggest fish in the lake! As an alternative to ‘hair-rigging’ your baits on easier waters, you can use a multitude of ‘side-hooking’ method rigs. For example using a larger ‘long shank’ size 2 hook with maggots fed onto it and even plastic maggots too, and foam to ‘pop-up’ the bend of your hook. When the fish picks up the bait, the bend and point being more buoyant will go into the fishes’ mouth first so maximizing chances of hooking the fish. A big hook with lots of bait will help counteract the bait robbing activities of smaller fish too while you wait for the bigger ones to pick up your hook bait! The advantage of a long shanked hook as opposed to a short shank hook is that it has in effect a very wide ‘gape’ with a much longer distance up to the eye of the hook. To improve the correct hooking and ‘pick-up’ to landed fish ratio, the hook shank will have a slight curve to it so that the hook ‘turns’ and digs in to your finger every time you pull your hook over it to test it. I believe this is also part of the success of the ‘baitmaster’ hooks, being very curved, and acts very similar to ‘line-aligner’ type rigs in conventional modern carp fishing. Again, using a ‘long shank hook’ you can side hook with maize or sweetcorn and as above, add foam to your hook to ‘balance’ or ‘pop’ it up, and again, use plastic corn on the hook too. This method goes for soft pellet type baits too and also for using with pepperoni, spam or luncheon meat improved by soaking in amino acid compounds or ‘palatants’ etc. For catfish, bass and trout especially, maybe try side hooking small pieces of fresh fish combined with large cut worms. (I confess that I have caught some big carp on this too when they seem to be addicted to ‘natural food’ like bloodworm.) Another version is side hooking, using a large long shank size 2 hook, with white bait or small dead or live fish. This catches carp (especially at ‘fry time,’) and predatory fish like catfish, pike, perch, bass etc. This rig is great fun, because it can always turn up a big surprise! The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches. (Warning: This article is protected by copyright, but reprints with a link are OK.) By Tim Richardson. ‘The thinking angler’s fishing author and expert bait making guru.’ For more expert bait making information and ‘cutting-edge’ techniques see the expert acclaimed new ebook / book: “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” http://www.baitbigfish.com
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