SWEET CORN FRUSTRATION

     I was full of optimism when we arrived at the club lake this morning. For some reason the inner workings of what I like to think of as my mind, had decided on a change from my usual caster/worm bait combination to one of groundbait and corn. The latter has always worked well on this water particularly for Tench and Crucians so it would be no great risk. In the past I have always floatfished it close in but my interest had been piqued by the idea of fishing it on the feeder now that I am having more success with the method. Also, in the back of my mind were some of the fewer but better Roach it has caught me on surprisingly heavy tackle whilst chasing larger fish.

     We went back to the same swim that had produced a lot of Bream to my feeder-fished worms last time we were here. Back then, Pete had caught a nice Crucian on the float so, while we would both be using the same bait, we would have a nice comparison between methods. The results were not startling by any means, ours never are, but they did provide food for thought.

     We caught no Crucians, no Tench and precious few Roach, all of which we had confidently expected. In fact we caught the same (small) number of fish each, mostly Bream of course, but mine were predominantly bigger and that raised a few interesting questions. While the fish just weren't really feeding and despite catching far more than any of the other anglers we could see, hitting bites was a problem.As a rule I just put my corn on the hook but today I decided to fish it hair rigged and just wait out those commonly-unproductive bites in favour of something better.

     Many of those missed bites would have been from tiddlers or not bites at all but the inevitable liners. It felt like it worked as every fish I hooked was to an apparently unmissable and large pull-round. Pete however was getting bites continually, striking and missing a lot more but ultimately catching the same number of fish. Probably the biggest difference in my swim from previous visits was the lack of bubbling, suggesting that they were either not feeding as well or less interested in the corn than they have been in the worms and casters.