Pain or pleasure?

sagalout · Jun 2, 2012

I fished with worms the other day, hooked through the middle and held on the the barbless hook with a small piece of posties rubber band.

What a pain, the ungrateful little bleeders wriggled like buggery when hooked made the whole exercise difficult and then once in the water the little perch kept swimming of with the end in their gob.

I kept at it for about an hour and then thought "there ain't no pleasure in this" and reverted to pellet and sweetcorn.

Do you suffer for your fishing or do you modify your approach to make life easy?

waggy · Jun 2, 2012

No suffering, Saga: practise makes perfect as they say.
Worms are a rattling good bait and it's well worth the effort to develop an easily repeatable hooking technique. You don't need the rubber band unless you've kept them in steroid soaked moss - staple them on with a maggot.
The other thing I find is using a size 14 and bigger does help club fingers like mine.
I was using dendrobaena and little pink worms the other day to a maggot stapled size 14 open gape and had some very nice roach as well as a tench, my target species for the day. In the 2 hours I was there I lost my two best tench when they went to ground, or should I say weedbed, even though I'd started with a good raking. I had to give them some slack to get them free but they both chucked the hook; but better that than leaving tethered fish.

sagalout · Jun 2, 2012

I ain't saying they don't work, Waggy, but to much palaver and small perch nuisance for me.

terry m · Jun 2, 2012

Unfortunately using worms on a water that contains lots of small perch is always going to test the patience of the most dedicated angler!

waggy · Jun 4, 2012

Saga, you can get around the small perch to a certain extent by upping your hook size, doubling up on your worms and cramming as many maggots as it takes to fill the hook. But loose feeding red maggots in a constant rain will sometimes feed them off. But I'm not averse to catching small perch.
Nothing's a perfect solution.

sagalout · Jun 4, 2012

Waggy, the small perch are not taking the hook generally, they are sucking the worm dry and rather than buy enough maggots to feed them of I would prefer to buy me own private island

waggy · Jun 4, 2012

Strange isn't it. I love fishing with worm and you hate it. I've been using them since I was 4 or 5, first bait I ever used - that's 60 odd years ago now. When did you start with worm?

sagalout · Jun 5, 2012

Used them when I was kid, but we had barbed hooks then and I don't remember hordes of tiny fish as a problem, and then I tried them the other prior to posting this thread.

waggy · Jun 5, 2012

Ha Ha, I used to specialise in small fish as a kid. Watching small perch square up to a worm is fascinating.

Pain or pleasure?

sagalout

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sagalout

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terry m

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sagalout

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