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Bream seckrets on Canal... with Alan Scotthorne

21.04.2020 15:48:06

Bream seckrets on Canal... with Alan Scotthorne

 

The Voorne  is an ideal match water, located close to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and has been the home to some large matches, as English anglers can access it easily by taking the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, thus swelling the numbers of the competing Dutch anglers. It has come to be recognised as  a great match water. 

It has straight banks with large wooden platforms on each peg, and more importantly you can park on each peg. It also fills up with bream through the months of May and June, as the fish congregate for spawning, and weights up to fifty kilos are commonplace.

Over the years bream fishing in places like Ireland, where I have enjoyed some great success, have declined dramatically with clear water problems but Holland still seems to be productive so I have travelled over to the Voorne Canal to do this feature. It is a typical kind of big canal holding big Bream, many of which are found throughout Europe.

            When I arrived I met up with Dutch star Jan van Shcendal, who informed me that the festival the week before had been much more difficult than normal, probably due to the harsh winter, with some anglers even blanking! However, the temperature had started to lift markedly, and he was hopeful that the fishing would start to improve.

With weights up to fifteen kilos being recorded in the festival it was still fairly promising, but rather than going in with the normal heavy groundbait attack, a little caution was required I thought. Sometimes, a cautious approach can lead to better fishing. Worms and chopped worms are banned at this time of the year in Holland, bloodworm and joker is not normally used on this canal, so my choices were limited to casters, white maggots and corn. These would be the main baits. 

 

 Groundbaits For Big Bream.

 

           My all-time favourite goundbait for bream hasn't changed much over the years and I still stick with a mix of English brown crumb combined with VDE World Champion on lakes and slow moving canals.

The way I mix it is quiet important though, as I want the mix to be very inert, with little or nothing coming off it. I achieve this, by over-wetting the mix so that all the particles are well soaked. In fact, it’s probably better to mix it the night before a match. You can add sweet liquid additives too, which also help to achieve a flat mix, but I prefer not to add them, preferring instead to keep with the basic mix.

 Because I mix on the morning before fishing I will have also pushed the mix through a riddle to break up any lumps. The brown crumb is high in food value and the World Champion adds the stickiness to the mix because it has a lot of biscuit in it and it’s always served me well when bream are the target species.

            In fact, some years ago in 1997, a very young William Raison was in the Drennan Team England for the first time, and we had travelled to Croatia for the World Champs on a rowing course near Zagreb. We had practised together for two weeks and it became apparent that William was hooking a lot more larger stamp fish i.e. grass carp and bream than the rest of us. We were all using similar groundbaits and couldn't understand why this was happening, until we examined how it was mixed. It came to light that William had significantly over whetted the mix to the point where it was all most ruining it, but importantly there were no particles that would lift off the bottom. That proved to be the key!

We started to do the same and the results were unbelievable! We all caught much bigger fish. This was something he had been doing at Gold Valley Lakes, so it was just normal for him.

 

Feeding on the side of caution!

 

            Because the canal was fishing difficult, and Jan had told me that when the fish are in the swim a lot of fish were being foul hooked, I didn't want to fish right on top of where I was going to introduce my balls of feed, preferring instead to create a ‘balled-in’ area at 12,50 meters. I would then look to fish past the feed a little bit over a much tighter cupped in spot at 13,00 meters, where these balls would contain a lot of food items. This, I hoped, would eliminate the problem of foul hooked fish but still give me the option to remove the short ‘dolly butt’ on my pole, allowing me to drop back and have a quick look over my main groundbait area. 

One problem with this canal is that it is extremely deep (5 metres!) at thirteen metres out, and not much shallower closer to the bank! When it’s warm, the fish can often be caught at half depth, so the natural behaviour is for the fish to be off the bottom.

At the start, I balled in about five litres of my mix, adding just half a pint of casters and half a pint of dead white maggots, (red maggots are band in Holland), plus a good handful of corn as a holding bait. At thirteen metres, I then cupped in six balls loaded with bait with a 250ml size Drennan pot, making sure the pole was on the front rest exactly were it would be with a rig in the water. Again, the more accurate you can be, the fewer foul hooked fish you will encounter. Once I had fed these two areas, I settled down to fish. Confronted with flat calm conditions and a bright day it was always going to be a bit of a waiting game!

 

Choice of Rigs and Elastics

 

         Because conditions were calm I set-up just two rigs. Firstly, a Rive 106 float that has a oval body in a 1.50gr size, for fishing dead depth. It was fixed on a 0.14mm Shimano Antares Silk Shock main line, to a 0.12mm fluoro carbon hook length to a size 18 Carp Match hook.

The second rig was comprised of a Rive 5 pattern float that has a slightly thicker bristle in a 2gr size, primarily for laying as much as a thirty centimetres of line on the bottom, again 0.14 mm main line, but hook length was 0.12mm Antares Silk shock to a size 16 Carp Match, these hooks are also available in barbed version called Red Maggot.

         Both floats were of a shape that allows you could hold the bait still if the canal does move slightly. You may ask why a flouro carbon hook length?  I have found that when fishing with a dead depth rig that you get more bites with the flouro carbon as it is difficult to see in water, especially in clear water such as is found on the Voorne canal.

             For the lighter rig, I chose a doubled size five elastic, as it is soft but has more power when stretched, and for the more aggressive rig I opted for a yellow Drennan hollow core elastic, which will deal with the bigger bream quickly if a few turn up.          The elastic is down the top two sections of my Shimano Aspire pole, but the number one section has been removed and the no2 has been fitted with a new extra long Drennan internal PTFE bush. That helps the elastic to work extremely smoothly.  Another essential, is to place a clean cap bung in  the number four section, to stop any water running inside the pole tip which may hinder striking, especially if you need to put the pole tip in the water to improve presentation.

Both rigs are shotted with olivettes, plus three number eight dropper shots. With this canal being so deep, I wouldn't hesitate to set up a heavier rig, if the wind suddenly increased in strength. 

Because the fish are regularly off the bottom, any fish accepting a bait on the bottom will probably give you a lift bite on the float so with this in mind, I would bulk the three number eights on top of the hook length to exaggerate this upward lift on the float. The hook length is 15cms long, so you can lay this on bottom with the drop shot just off bottom to help keep the bait still.

                     

How the session progressed.

 

           After one hour, I had not had a single fish, but had received several indications on the float to tell me there were certainly a few fish around. There were also a few bream ‘topping’ so I made the decision to start to feeding more frequently, loose feeding was not an option as I didn't think there were enough fish about to catch shallow plus I didn't want to mess up my bottom swim.

 I contemplated throwing an odd ball to try to bring the odd fish into the bait, but thinking back to what Jan had said, maybe this would be a problem with foul hooking them. In the end, I decided to feed with the pole-pot a small golf ball of groundbait, with very little bait in it, because it was probably true to say that what was on the bottom had not been eaten yet. I also added just a sprinkling of loose casters in the pot too.

This ploy worked brilliantly, and I was soon off the mark with a 2 kilo bream. I encouraged the swim along slowly by feeding every ten to fifteen minutes and I'm sure the bream were following the bait down, rather than coming to what I had already fed on the bottom.

            Several times, I dropped back onto the balled-in area. and never had a bite, so quite clearly, the regular feeding was the only thing drawing in the fish. I did get carried away at one point, feeding rather too regularly and foul hooked two on the trot.

The best rig proved to be the 1,50gram float, set just 2cms on the bottom. I can understand how some anglers had struggled in the festival, particularly if they had overfed at the start, and had not realised that the fish needed feeding regularly.

One other thing that surprised me was that dead maggots were the best hook bait, probably because the fish were not feeding properly yet after spawning? It could have been all too easy to not feed and never know that the fish needed to follow the bait down.

                 I finished the session with about fourteen bream for about eighteen kilos and was quiet pleased with the result. Cupping more regularly from the start might have resulted in a few more fish early on. All in all it was interesting fishing and maybe I might even pay this venue a visit come next May and try and win that well run festival!

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MATCH fishing

MATCH fishing

Bream seckrets on Canal... with Alan Scotthorne

Bream seckrets on Canal... with Alan Scotthorne

 The Voorne  is an ideal match water, located close to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and has been the home to some large matches, as English anglers can  The Voorne  is an ideal match water, located close to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and has been the home to some large matches, as English anglers can 2020-04-21T15:48:10+03:00 Bream seckrets on Canal... with Alan Scotthorne

<p><img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/09.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Voorne &nbsp;is an ideal match water, located close to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and has been the home to some large matches, as English anglers can access it easily by taking the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam, thus swelling the numbers of the competing Dutch anglers. It has come to be recognised as &nbsp;a great match water.&nbsp;</p> <p>It has&nbsp;straight banks with&nbsp;large wooden platforms on each peg, and more importantly you can park on each peg. It also fills up with bream through the months of May and June, as the fish congregate for spawning, and weights up to fifty kilos are commonplace.</p> <p>Over the years bream fishing in places like Ireland, where I have enjoyed some great success, have declined dramatically with clear water problems but Holland still seems to be productive so I have travelled over to the Voorne Canal to do this feature. It is a typical kind of big canal holding big Bream, many of which are found throughout Europe.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When I arrived I met up with Dutch star Jan van Shcendal, who informed me that the festival the week before had been much more difficult than normal, probably due to the harsh winter, with some anglers even blanking! However, the temperature had started to lift markedly, and he was hopeful that the fishing would start to improve.</p> <p>With&nbsp;weights up to fifteen kilos being recorded in the&nbsp;festival it was still fairly promising, but rather than going in with the normal heavy groundbait attack, a little caution was required I thought. Sometimes, a cautious approach can lead to better fishing. Worms and chopped worms are banned at this time of the year in Holland, bloodworm and joker is not normally used on this canal, so my choices were limited to casters, white maggots and corn. These would be the main baits.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;<img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/18.jpg" alt="" width="398" height="599" /></p> <p>&nbsp;<strong>Groundbaits For Big Bream.</strong></p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; My all-time favourite goundbait for bream hasn't changed much over the years and I still stick with a mix of English brown crumb combined with VDE World Champion on lakes and slow moving canals.</p> <p>The way I mix it is quiet important though, as I want the mix to be very inert, with little or nothing coming off it. I achieve this, by over-wetting the mix so that all the particles are well soaked. In fact, it&rsquo;s probably better to mix it the night before a match. You can add sweet liquid additives too, which also help to achieve a flat mix, but I prefer not to add them, preferring instead to keep with the basic mix.</p> <p>&nbsp;Because I mix on the morning before fishing I will have also pushed the mix through a riddle to break up any lumps. The brown crumb is high in food value and the World Champion adds the stickiness to the mix because it has a lot of biscuit in it and it&rsquo;s always served me well when bream are the target species.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In fact, some years ago in 1997, a very young William Raison was in the Drennan Team England for the first time, and we had travelled to Croatia for the World Champs on a rowing course near Zagreb. We had practised together for two weeks and it became apparent that William was hooking a lot more larger stamp&nbsp;fish i.e. grass carp and bream than the rest of us. We were all using similar groundbaits and couldn't understand why this was happening, until we examined how it was mixed. It came to light that William had significantly over whetted the mix to the point where it was all most ruining it,&nbsp;but importantly there were no particles that would lift off the bottom. That proved to be the key!</p> <p>We started to do the same and the results were unbelievable! We all caught much bigger fish. This was something he had been doing at Gold Valley Lakes, so it was just normal for him.</p> <p>&nbsp;<img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/_dsc5442.jpg" alt="" width="691" height="460" /></p> <p><strong>Feeding on the side of caution!</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Because the canal was fishing difficult, and Jan had told me that when the fish are in the swim a lot of fish were being foul hooked, I didn't want to fish right on top of where I was going to introduce my balls of feed, preferring instead to create a &lsquo;balled-in&rsquo; area at 12,50 meters. I would then look to fish past the feed a little bit over a much tighter cupped in spot at 13,00 meters, where these balls would contain a lot of food items. This, I hoped, would eliminate the problem of foul hooked fish but still give me the option to remove the short &lsquo;dolly butt&rsquo; on my pole, allowing me to drop back and&nbsp;have a quick look over my main groundbait area.&nbsp;</p> <p>One problem with this canal is that it is extremely deep (5 metres!) at thirteen metres out,&nbsp;and not much shallower closer to the bank! When it&rsquo;s warm, the fish can often be caught at half depth, so the natural behaviour is for the fish to be off the bottom.</p> <p>At the start, I balled in about five litres of my mix, adding just half a pint of casters and half a&nbsp;pint of dead white maggots, (red maggots are band in Holland), plus a good handful of corn as a holding bait. At thirteen metres, I then cupped in six balls loaded with bait with a 250ml size&nbsp;Drennan pot, making sure the pole was on the front rest exactly were it would be with a rig in the water. Again, the more accurate you can be, the fewer foul hooked fish you will encounter. Once I had fed these two areas, I settled down to fish. Confronted with flat calm conditions and a bright day it was always going to be a bit of a waiting game!</p> <p>&nbsp;<img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/dsc_7239.jpg" alt="" width="647" height="429" /></p> <p><strong>Choice of Rigs and Elastics</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Because conditions were&nbsp;calm I set-up just two rigs. Firstly, a Rive 106 float that has a oval body in a 1.50gr size, for fishing dead depth. It was fixed&nbsp;on a 0.14mm Shimano Antares Silk Shock main line, to a 0.12mm fluoro carbon hook length to a size 18 Carp Match hook.</p> <p>The second rig was comprised of a Rive 5 pattern float that has a slightly thicker bristle in a 2gr size, primarily for laying as much as a thirty centimetres of line on the bottom, again 0.14 mm main line, but hook length was 0.12mm Antares Silk shock to a size 16 Carp Match, these hooks are also available in barbed version called Red Maggot.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Both floats were of a shape that allows you could hold the bait still if the canal does move slightly. You may ask why a flouro carbon hook length? &nbsp;I have found that when fishing with a dead depth rig that you get more bites with the flouro carbon as it is difficult to see in water, especially in clear water such as is found on the Voorne canal.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For the lighter rig, I chose a doubled size five elastic, as it is soft but has more power when stretched, and for the more aggressive rig I opted for a yellow Drennan hollow core elastic, which will deal with the bigger bream quickly if a few turn up. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The elastic is down the top two sections of my Shimano Aspire pole, but the number one section has been removed and the no2 has been fitted with a new extra long Drennan internal PTFE bush. That helps the elastic to work extremely smoothly.&nbsp; Another essential, is to place a clean cap bung&nbsp;in &nbsp;the number four section, to stop any water running inside the pole tip which may hinder striking, especially if you need to put the pole tip in the water to improve presentation.</p> <p>Both rigs are shotted with olivettes, plus three number eight dropper shots. With this canal being so deep, I wouldn't hesitate to set up a heavier rig, if the wind suddenly increased in strength.&nbsp;</p> <p>Because the fish are regularly off the bottom, any fish accepting a bait on the bottom will probably give you a lift bite on the float so with this in mind, I would bulk the three number eights on top of the hook length to exaggerate this upward lift on the float. The hook length is 15cms long, so you can lay this on bottom with the drop shot just off bottom to help keep the bait still.</p> <p><img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/dsc_7266.jpg" alt="" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>How the session&nbsp;progressed.</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; After one hour, I had not had a single fish, but had received several indications on the float to tell me there were certainly a few fish around. There were also a few bream &lsquo;topping&rsquo; so I made the decision to start to feeding more frequently, loose feeding was not an option as I didn't think there were enough fish about to catch shallow plus I didn't want to mess up my bottom swim.</p> <p>&nbsp;I contemplated throwing an odd ball to try to bring the odd fish into the bait, but thinking back to what Jan had said, maybe this would be a problem with foul hooking them. In the end, I decided to feed with the pole-pot a small golf ball of groundbait, with very little bait in it, because it was probably true to say that what was on the bottom had not been eaten yet. I also added just a sprinkling of loose casters in the pot too.</p> <p>This ploy worked brilliantly, and I was soon off the mark with a 2 kilo bream. I encouraged the swim along slowly by feeding every ten to fifteen minutes and I'm&nbsp;sure the bream were following the bait down, rather than coming to what I had already fed on the bottom.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Several times, I dropped back onto the balled-in area. and never had a bite, so quite clearly, the regular feeding was the only thing drawing in the fish. I did get carried away at one point, feeding rather too regularly and foul hooked two on the trot.</p> <p>The best rig proved to be the 1,50gram float, set just 2cms on the bottom. I can understand how some anglers had struggled in the festival, particularly if they had overfed at the start, and had not realised that the fish needed feeding regularly.</p> <p>One other thing that surprised me was that dead maggots were the best hook bait, probably because the fish were not feeding properly yet after spawning? It could have been all too easy to not feed and never know that the fish needed to follow the bait down.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I finished the session with about fourteen bream for about eighteen kilos and was quiet pleased with the result. Cupping more regularly from the start might have resulted in a few more fish early on. All in all it was interesting fishing and maybe I might even pay this venue a visit come next May and try and win that well run festival!</p> <p><img src="https://cdncloudcart.com/14701/files/image/_dsc5634.jpg" alt="" /></p>

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