Cheese Feast for those Winter Chub

With the countryside covered in snow, ice down the margins of the River Ribble there was only one species of fish to hunt down, that was the chub. The perfect fish to seek in winter. One successful chub angler is John Monaghan of Preston who fishes the River Ribble for chub using a maggot feeder, as John told me "I cast the maggot packed feeder out every five minutes building up the swim which can often take a couple of hours" Its certainly a winning way for John. As proved recently when he was judged the winner of Coarse Angling Today magazine award winner for December 2010. Its method I too used in the past but today I can't afford the price of gentles at £3-50- a pint.

These days my baits for chub are sausage meat and cheese paste, bread and lobworms, there are times when I also use pieces of Pallatrax Multiworm stick covered in paste of the same flavour, occasionally I use Multiworm boilies. Today you can get cheese paste in handy pots from Pallatrax along with their Cheese Squabs, I have made my own cheese paste since the 1940’s, and this new cheese paste in a tub is excellent. I fish the squabs on a size 10 barbless hook by using small latex pellet band. Having Mutiple Sclerosis I find it difficult to band a pellet to the shank of a small hook. Thankfully Kevin at Tadley Angling came up with the answer. The pellet bander. If you have arthritic hands or suffer from similar problems I can recommend this small tackle item. I’m not fond of using a hair when chub fishing, I reckon you miss too many bites, you can of course have a short hair with the bait tight to the hook shank, but I reckon this defeats the object.

My two top baits for winter chub are probably bread and cheese paste; I caught my first chub as a young cub on a camping trip to the river Medway when Brown Owl gave me some cheese to use as bait. It accounted for my first chub, since that day I must have caught thousands of chub up to 7-10-0, many of them on the two mentioned baits.
A question I am often asked is why I’m catching fish from such a swim when the questioner doesn’t ever get a bite when he fishes the same spot. It’s a hard question to answer except to say “A lot depends on how you go about fishing a particular swim”.
Many anglers make the mistake of standing at the water’s edge where they plan to fish; all you do is spook any fish in that area. It’s most important to move quietly and keep out of sight, remember fish are a wild animal. Remember you don’t see chub move off with fright as you would other species, they just disappear ghost like.

On the River Kennet Paul Smyth and I can usually put a few fish in the net even on the hardest of days. Yes, we get blanks but we try to make sure we don’t make too many mistakes; we also fish swims we know will often produce a fish under a certain set of weather and water conditions. So many anglers seem to think fish are spread around in the water like currents in a pudding. They are not.
My advice for what its worth is make up a bucket of finely mashed bread and bran adding a flavour of your choice. If its chub then I reckon a cheese spray flavour is as good as you can get. I will then walk the river bank keeping as far back as possible; at every likely looking swim I will introduce a handful of mash. Sometimes adding two or three bait size pieces of sausage meat, cheese paste or bread flake.
I then move to the top of the beat have a brew, even read the newspaper or just sit quietly watching the wildlife. Don’t attempt to fish the baited spots for at least thirty minutes, often I wait an hour.
If its chub you’re hunting once you have got a fish, take it well upstream before releasing it. After adding some more mash, a couple of hook bait samples I move on returning to the spot later in the day or evening.

Bright Sunshine and Clear Water are the Kiss of Death

If you have a high pressure zone sitting over the country, bright sunshine and clear water, then don’t attempt to fish until late in the day. We mustn’t forget that predator the cormorant which will cause the fish to hide up in bright condition. I arrive about an hour before dark, having chosen a couple of swims I add some mash then leave it alone for thirty minutes. It’s not often I have a blank as can be testified by the many anglers who fish with me. Last week the River Ribble was iced over in some areas I suggested Dave Foster of Wigan to fish a certain swim for the last hour of the day with an hour in the dark. He caught 5 good chub and missed 2 bites.



Why Not Try Float Fishing

Much of my chub fishing involves fishing the bait on the bottom either legering or with a free lined bait. Should I arrive at the water and find conditions are suitable I will often choose to float fish. It’s a great searching method that allows you to fish bait downstream twenty, thirty even forty yards, now that’s a lot of water. It also allows you to pin point the area of the swim where you can expect to find where the chub or other species are shoaled up. With accurate feeding it’s surprising how far you can draw fish upstream. But make sure you don’t get the fish shoaled to close; otherwise you will be playing your hooked fish among shoal which will quickly spook.