Bluelabel wrote:All of my margin fishing is done with a "Pin" (with check on in case of an unscheduled nap
)
I tend to use a small piece of peacock quill (approx 4-5", fished top and bottom with the quill laying flat, but weighted with a pair of AA shot to get the bait down hard on the bottom... bait wise I tend to use the dreaded boilies as that is what the fish on our waters tend to go for, having said that I'm going to give some other more natural baits a try this season, like pinto beans, corn, kidney beans and the like, with hemp as the attractor...
I doubt there are more than a handful of waters where you would have to use a boilie in order to catch a good carp.
You can encourage carp to eat boilies and even particular flavour boilies by repeatedly feeding them large numbers of those boilies, but you can't take away the instinct of a carp to eat a wide range of other food if it is offered including more natural baits.
Its the classic case of the self-fulfilling prophecy where carp anglers read in all the magazines that you need to use boilies to catch carp ( along with hair-rigs, etc, etc) They join a club or syndicate and find the members who fish the water tell them they only catch the carp on boilies, and so they do likewise.
But if you actually choose to use something simple like breadcrust, worms, sweetcorn or dog biscuits you will find you will still catch carp.
At the first syndicate pool I joined six years ago, a now sadly lost idyllic traditional type of pool, I was told when I joined that although the syndicate owner wanted to encourage the members to use traditional methods and baits nearly all of them were using boilies ( and had been doing so for years). I was also told that although the carp are frequently on the surface no one catches them on the surface. Twenty minutes into my first session I caught a carp on floating breadcrust. Over the next four years I caught most of the carp in the pool on dog biscuits, breadcrust, lobworms, breadflake, and kidney beans.
I now catch carp in a smilar way at another syndicate pool where most of the other members have always used boilies.