My way with bread, part 1

With the winter starting to truly show its colours with wind and rain abound I thought that I would share with you a few of my bread fishing tips that I have picked up over the years. Bread is an awesome bait all year round but it is particularly good in the depths of winter on canals and rivers when they are running low and clear. Where, how and why I fish bread will follow in another post but for the start I am going to talk about bait prep.

HOOKBAIT

This is simplicity itself, I have two ways that I prepare it and that largely depends on the venue and the fish that I am after, if it is small roach and I need a lot of them I will take 3 slices of a Warburton medium loaf (the one in the waxed bread), cut the crusts off and then roll each one under a rolling pin to make it nice and compact, these hardened slices are then cut in half and placed into a resealable bag. This gives you 6 pieces of compacted bread for the hook so if 1 dries out a little on your bait tray, throw it in the edge and get another. Simplees. This is good but sometimes on particularly hard days you will notice that you are waiting ages for a bite on bread, what I believe causes this is that the fish will not eat it unless it is really soft, so I prepare another type of hooker bread. This is done by taking 3 slices of bread as above and then cutting off the crusts, cutting half and then placing into a resealable bag. As you may have noticed there is a lot of wastage from a sliced loaf with only 6 slices getting used, but, this bait will sit in the freezer ready to go for a couple of months.
Another time that I use bread in the winter is on carp venues either for popping up on the lead (which the soft hookers are used) or for dobbing on the pole around structure ( hard hooker is better for the amount of lifting and dropping). How I do this again will be covered later.

FEED

There are two schools of thought when it comes to bread feed, liquidised or punch crumb, I have  fished and prepared them both and have never really had any success with punch crumb and even in 3 meters of flowing water I would err to the side of liquidised bread. Personal preference I know but this is how I prepare it:





Firstly you need bread, my favourite for feed is Hovis white in the doorstep size, you will also need a few trays:

 Riddles, I use 2mm and a flour sieve:

And of course a food processor:

First step is to tear all the crusts off of the bread:

 Now put the bread through the food processor:

This can take a while so I usually go prepared:

Once it is liquidised I will then pass it through
a 2mm riddle to take out all the large lumps
that could over feed the fish at this time of year:

 And you should be left with something that looks like this:

All the left over large lumps can be passed back through the food processor to try and get as much from the loaf as possible, and then riddled again. Anything that I cannot get smaller  will put into a bag and freeze for another day.
At this time I will also riddle a couple of handfuls through the flour sieve to make some super fine bread for super hard days. But you will be left with  something that looks a little like this:

These bags can be used straight away or, as I tend to do, place them in the freezer then they will become even finer. I hope that this helps your fishing in the future and I will be looking at tactics, rigs and feeding in later posts.
See you on the bank.