how much groundbait to use when float fishing for bream

Back in the summer I spent a couple of months float fishing in shallow water about 4-5 foot deep for bream in the 2 - 5 Lb bracket.

I found i was succesful using the following approach but now wonder wether i was overdoing it with the ground bait.

Vitalin was my groundbait of choice

I would start of by introducing 4 - 5 large orange size balls of groundbait.

I would then fire out 6 - 12 maggots every cast.

Then introduce another ball of grounbait every 20-30 mins

Do you guys think the amount of bait i was using was excessive

you say it was succesful so why worry!!

its the age old question though Nicky, do you put more in on top of feeding fish? sometimes it keeps them coming, other times it knackers it up

true, but my fishing used to be very limited up untill a few years ago, where i used to only river fish for trout grayling and chub.

Now that i've taken to still water fishing in a big way, I like to know that i'm going about things in the correct way, mind you i located a shoal of bream months before anyone else cottoned and really made the most of it, then i think the people who did fish the area only did cause i couldn't keep my mouth shut I always give all my best spots away.

My local is made up of three seperate pieces of water all connected by sluses or small channels (excuse my spelling) and last summer they drained the top lake so that they could dredge it but didn't remove the fish, whilst some of them escaped through a channel into the north lake, alot of them were picked of by birds, but I though it stands to reason that alot of the fish went down the sluse into the bottom peice of water rather than die so I targeted the main pool directly below.

This part of the water I was told by local commitee and matchmen wouldn't hold bream as it was too shallow and that any bream would be in the deeper canal part, how wrong they were, I fished there every saturday for about two months and caught some heavy weights of bream, caught my first crucian and a few other surprises along the way

its surprising how shallow you can get bream, ive had them on my local lake in water so shallow they must be swimming on their sides!

The water you fish sounds verry similar to the one I do, its a series of mature estate lakes, four in all, and the predominent species is bream, nothing massive, mainly big skimmers but the odd ones nudging 5or6lb. The place has me pulling my hair out, its got to be the only water I know that has fish in shoals of no more than 6! - I can never catch steadily throughout the day no matter what i try, be it filling it in or little & often. You get a mad spell of 5 or 6 fish in as many chucks then nothing for a couple of hours until the next mad spell.

I belong to a water which is very large, and quite deep, it has a good head of big Bream. These fish are hard to find or to get them feeding, but, when they do come on and feed, it is neccessary to have a lot of feed in place just to try to hold them in that one area for any length of time. They will swim in, feed, mop up the lot in minutes, and disappear rapidly unless i have fed VERY heavily. To ball on top of them when they are feeding could spook them easily. I think it really depends on the stamp of fish and the size of the water how you attack it, also the previous few days weather conditions have a big influence on how they may feed, or how to feed it. Like fishing in most places, it is seldom the same two days running. Conversly, i fish another water, again deep and with Brean averaging 8lb, heavy feeding is counter-productive, five or six initial feeders, then a feederful every 10 minutes works best until the tip goes around. Tricky buggers, aint they! hehe