IYCF Magazine ? Interview with the Editor

What ground bait, feed would you recommend when you are restricted by the commercial pools bait rules?

Now there's an open question,depends on the bans really.
On the assumption that maggots aren't listed on the restrictions.
Loose feed them,dead or alive.
Give us a clue, as to the restrictions your refering to.

First of all depends on their rules.
Most tend to ban high oil pellets these days like Trout pellet and paste, but unless you are specifically told only the 'Fisheries own pellets' are acceptable, then try Halibut pellets and paste-which is actually better than Trout paste.

If groundbait is banned you could cube tiny pieces of meat through a grater and dust them in groundbait, or use liquidised bread or corn steeper via a cup ,with punch or corn on the hook.

In winter caster and chopped worm is deadly on these pools anyway,but as the weather warms up, I think the key is to feed something different or of different size to what you have on the hook.

On venues where maggot brings you only tiny fish, and pellets in all forms are banned, I have used cubes or punched out pellet shaped pieces of flavoured/dusted meat over corn.

You can do that in reverse of course, though wash the fat off the meat first before you riddle it or it can float!

Hope thios gives food for thought but if you let me know what the rules are I will suggest an approach which would work.

What Commercials are you thinking of?

At Gold Valley for example there are limits applied to quantities of groundbait and types of feed pellets amongst several other bans (none of which seem to limit the catch rate available if you apply a little thinking). GV is exceptional in that it is a mature fishery where the stock levels are high but not excessive.

Small open ended feeder tactics work very well in Spring/Summer conditions and straight lead works well in Winter.

I used groundbait feeder yesterday for the first time since last autumn and it worked very well indeed. In approx 7 hours I used less than 1kg of g/bait (50/50 Crazy Bait Gold & brown crumb with about 1/2 pint of micro feed pellets mixed in) and had an excellent day out.

One of the current "in-methods" is tiny PVA bags of pellets (about 20 4ml pellets). Also, even in the recent colder periods, matches have been won with the "splasher waggler" up in the water whilst regularly loose feeding tiny quantities of pellets by catapult.

One regular "dodge" to think about with the g/bait feeder (if you have to ration the contents) is to regularly switch to a foam filled one glugged in the appropriate flavour/scent.

My aim at GV is to usually use as little food as I can get away with, hopefully just enough to keep the fish interested for long periods rather than a "pile it high" approach which can lead to too many fish in the area and loads of liners or foul hooked fish.