Catch Reports
Smash and Grab!!
Posted in Catch Reports on 20th January 2008Lee Willmott doesn’t seem to find that much time to go fishing in between rolling hundreds of kilo’s of bait each week, but when he does, he always seems to make up for it! Once again, his latest short ‘overnighter’ saw him on the banks of his own fishery, Springwood Pool, and on this occasion he managed to smash the lake record with this stunning 35lb 12oz mirror!
The big fish, which hadn’t seen the bank for over 20-months, fell on the stroke of midnight during an aggressive storm, but the winterised version of the Shellfish B5 was enough to finally tempt the elusive specimen out of retirement. Lee introduced 25-free offerings and a kilo of matching B5 pellets to a silty depression at 30-yards to bank the ultra-shy mirror.
Corker Pop-Ups
Cork dust pop-ups have a number of advantages over other pop-ups.
1) Made with identical ingredients/attractors to free offerings and send out the same food signals.
2) More durable and less prone to ‘theft’ from nuisance fish, crayfish and birdlife!
3) They can be pierced with a baiting needle without losing buoyancy.
4) Brilliant for ‘snowman’ presentations where you can trim down the corker pop up with scissor blades to achieve the perfect level of buoyancy required.
5) Ease of use.
Top tip for long term buoyancy
When fishing pop-up rigs in deep water for long periods of time or on waters where bird life can be a problem, drill out a cavity in the corker pop up with an 8mm drill bit then plug it with Gardner Tackle’s cylindrical high density rig foam (yellow). Then pierce the corker pop up on to your hook/rig, making sure the baiting needle goes up through the yellow foam first, then secure with boilie stop. I guarantee you that you can leave your pop up out there for 3-days if needed with no loss of buoyancy! Further to this, in the unlikely event that a diving coot or tufty unknowingly pinches your pop up, you are still fishing a nice visual yellow ‘fake’ bait.
