Bag up with bread sticks this winter

It’s a strange old game this carp angling, it seems that no sooner is a method publicised and hammered than we have a tendency to let it slip by in favour of something else, when in reality these methods just need tweaking or refining to get the best out of them. Look at match anglers fishing for F1 hybrids: you won’t see them piling in pellets, simply because they just won’t get the bites they need, it’s more like roach fishing than carp fishing to them, yet they will need high weights to get into the frame. And you could do worse than watch a match angler feeding, they need to know just how much and when to feed to get the best out of what is in front of them.

So there is one method that comes to mind and which is devastating in the colder months, and also it’s cheap as chips! Popularised by Lee Jackson, it’s liquidised bread fished in PVA tubing to brilliant ‘Bread Sticks’! The great thing about this method is that there is a great choice in different forms of breads, from value white breads through to breads with honey and seeds in them, these can give a nice edge with an inherent ‘crunch factor’ that carp seem to enjoy. One tip here when it comes to bread colour, if you have loads of birdlife then look at blending the colours and whilst carp love straight white bread, so do our feathered friends! And if it gets really bad then add bait dyes to achieve the colour you are after.

You can buy a cheap blender/liquidiser from Argos keeping the missus happy in the process, which means you can then add some nice smelly additives to the bread after it has been liquidised. I always add a good pinch of rock salt to the Bread Stick mix and will even add liquidised boilie in as well just to give a different feeding pattern. Experiment with the density of the bread and additives so you can achieve variable activity, even adding baking soda which is better dyed to get colour going through the water column.

One thing that shouldn’t be forgotten is that other species of fish like bread in its various forms, but again this can be an advantage as a source of attraction to the carp. Critically look at the bread as a semi-feed and attractor carrier and remember with a cheap feed filler you can add the temperature sensitive additives to the Bread Stick and believe me this makes a PHENOMENAL DIFFERENCE!

Another nice edge is to fish a mixture of liquidised bread with dead and live maggot. This can be deadly in the winter and also helps with the cost of maggot as it goes a long way.

So you can see from this that the permutations with the liquidised bread are endless, really it’s just down to the imagination of the angler! So use your loaf and become the breadwinner!