Chris Yates - sweetcorn pioneer

[Beresford]

We were using sweetcorn as kids in the mid 1970's. We must have read about it in the Angling Times or a fishing magazine.

[ChrisHewett]

I joined the city of London piscatorial society in the late 70s. We had a lake at Newdigate near Gatwick airport. The lake was stuffed full of small "wildies ". Members who had been in the club longer than me said that Chris Yates had, years earlier, caught large carp that were unknown, on curry flavoured sweetcorn. The bigger carp were hard to catch as the wildies were so voracious. I caught a 17lb mirror when I started using boilies and prebaiting. The old members didn't believe me and disapproved of modern methods. In those days the number of members was limited to 100.

[Old Man River]

I joined the Army and in 1972, was posted to Berlin, where we fished in the many lakes in the area, I remember there was a lake in front of one of the barracks there but cannot remember its name, I think the Greenjackets were the battalion in residence, but could be wrong ,myself and another lad were the only anglers there, and when we went first started fishing in Berlin, we went into a tackle shop enquiring about bait ,the shop owner told us to use sweetcorn for the Bream, and sold us a couple of plastic bags of it ,which we did use with great success,using mashed up Sweetcorn and bread mash for groundbait, and whole corn on the hook. I continued with it when I came back to the UK in 1976 , and had some good Tench bags using it, I never considered it a "new" bait at all.
It was not easy to get hold of in Berlin, we used to get it from the American "PX" . We could not work out where the chap in the tackle shop got his corn from, but there were plenty of smallholders who grew all sorts of stuff so I supoose corn would not be such a problem.

OMR

Edit...

I remember there were some huge Catfish resident in some of the lakes, and I mean huge, the Berlin anglers used to fish for them using rowing boats , and had what we would call big game gear to master them, there was one in an aquarium in the City that had been caught in one of the lakes, it was about six feet long as I remember , with a mouth like my mother in law, well, maybe I am being a bit unjust to the Catfish with that statement .

OMR