Does fishing a bait on the edge of a baited area really work?

This is a question I get asked a fair bit and the one word answer is: yes. Now for the long version. In my mind, this method of fishing a bait off the edge or slightly away from the main patch of bait does work because a naturally wary creature which a carp is won’t normally tend to go straight in and feed smack bang in the middle of a baited patch unless it’s been primed up over a long period by pre-baiting. As we all know, these days, waters are so much busier so it’s hard to get away with doing such things to increase the carp’s confidence so a normal case scenario is to set your trap and hope for the best. On pressured waters this is when the bait off the side of the area can score, as the naturally cautious fish will pick at the side of the baited area and with every bait that goes down the hatch, their confidence will grow. With a hookbait positioned at the side of the area, this can indeed be a way of fast-tracking a bite rather than having to hope that the hookbait gets picked up amongst lots of others.

A lot of this can also depend on the stock of the water and how many fish are coming in to feed. If there’s competition they all lead each in and when their confidence is high, they start to compete with each other. With that said, I don’t tend to fish highly stocked waters so with normally three rods to play with I’ll always put on off the side of an area for the very reason in which I’ve just explained. A good example of this was my first capture of Pecs. Five kilos of bait was introduced to a fairly wide area via a throwing stick and three rods were put across it. The left-hand rod was positioned smack bang in the middle, the middle was just on the edge and the right-hand rod was cast a good few rod lengths away from any bait. It was the middle rod that went at a time of day when the normal bite time was over. This to me speaks volumes and I believe that fish were just coming in and picking off the side of the area and maybe if I hadn’t stuck a bit of cold steel in him when I did, he’d have built up more confidence and probably fallen to the rod in the middle of the patch the following morning. Strangely enough, a year later after spending three blank nights in a swim fishing in a similar way, I caught Pecs again, but this time it was just before first light, on a rod fished in the main baited area and the take came whilst playing a smaller fish that had sprung the bait on the edge of the area trap. Make what you will of that! Personally, I think my first capture of that fish came when it was on its own. The second came during a main feed when there was competition.

Another fish I know that is quite prone to getting caught on the bait off the side of an area is Frimley’s Charlies Mate. For some reason or another, this fish has grown big but doesn’t tend to get caught over a lot of bait. Why this is I don’t know, but what I do know is that some say big baiters have finally outwitted this fish when they have changed tactics or baiting strategies. Is Charlies Mate just a minesweeper and goes in for a feed after the main pack has been split by a hooked fish? Maybe she is, but she’ll more than likely fall to a single, a stringer or a bag just off the side of a known main area. Like all of this mini series, it’s ‘food for thought’ and worth looking into when you’ve set yourself the challenge of targeting a particular fish.