Fishing floating baits on the surface teaches you a lot about fish, for you can actually watch how they approach a bait. Although the conditions are quite different between the bottom and the surface, much of the fish's behaviour when confronted with a 'suspicious' bait on the top or on the bottom (the refusal, the aborted take, the snatch, and the confident suck) must be almost the same. Which all goes a long way towards teaching you what is going on at times when your bait lies out of sight on the bottom and your indicator tells you that something down there is showing an interest.
My first taste of surface fishing (other than dry-fly for trout, which has always been my favourite form of trout fishing) was with rudd on a small farm pond. I was only a boy at the time, but I distinctly remember, following a spell of float fishing for roach and rudd with my favourite home-made peacock quill floats, throwing in my bread leftovers for the moorhens to devour when I'd left, and seeing half a dozen or so hungry mouths attack the bread as though they were determined to beat the moorhens to it. That probably was part of the reason for the frenzied attack on the bread, for the rudd most likely knew that they had to get in first to stand a chance. What they wouldn't realise was that the moor hens would not make an appearance until I had moved out of earshot.
The other thing about that day that stands out in my mind is that although I had seen the rudd taking bread from the surface on many other occasions, it was only then that the thought entered my head that presenting a surface bait to them could be a good way of catching them! Fishing a slow-sinking bait was the nearest I had come to it before. I determined I would try it on my next visit, which was the next day as it happened. And the simple approach I adopted was to fish exactly as I had before, but with no shot on the line at all between hook and float. From that day I got better and better at catching those rudd off the top; finding the right length of bottom to use; the best hook size; timing of the strike; and how best to loose feed to keep them interested.
It was many years later, sometime in my salad years as a 'specimen hunter', when I went through my next spell of serious rudd hunting, this time on a Cheshire mere that was renowned for good tench and even better rudd. A good tench at the time was 4lb plus, of which the mere had a nice head of them up to 5lb or so, and the rudd went well over 2lb.
The big problem on this fishery was that there was only one short stretch of bank from which to fish, the remainder being a bird sanctuary and out of bounds to anglers. Not surprisingly, it was the far bank where most of the marginal vegetation grew and therefore where the biggest rudd spent most of their time. But when the wind was right they followed it towards the fishable bank; you could see them priming and swirling at the surface as they sucked in spent insects.
To catch the biggest fish still meant a cast of more than 30yds, which ruled out float fishing of any efficiency, and also meant that loose feeding with crusts by catapult was out of the question (Chum Mixer-type biscuits were still being fed to dogs and cats only; fish were yet to have the pleasure).
So the hookbait had to go out via Arlesey Bomb on some kind of leger set-up. And I had to find a way of introducing loose feed.
The rig I decided to use was pretty simple, no more, really, than a modified fixed paternoster. I knew the depth so it was easy to get the rig set up correctly without a great deal of trial and error. To this day I have yet to find a better method of surface fishing at long range, providing the water is no deeper than about 6ft. Any deeper and sliding/running rigs have to be employed, which are fine if there are no algae particles floating around, which can foul up swivel eyes and make hard work of everything.
The beauty of the rig is that it is so easy to fish the bait at any exact depth you choose simply by allowing the bait to lie on the surface, and then hauling it down by pulling on the line at the butt ring and attaching a heavy bobbin at the bottom of the loop as soon as the depth you wish to fish at is reached. The bobbin has to be just heavy enough to stop the crust from rising again - what carp anglers call critically balanced. That way the rudd have only to sniff at the bait and the bobbin will begin to rise. I think this is a very significant factor towards the success of this method, for if a rudd shows an interest in the bait, if only swirling close to it, the crust begins to rise towards the surface; in effect behaving very naturally indeed, and simply asking to be grabbed before a competitor snatches the morsel from under its nose. The bigger the bait you use (within reason) the more easily it is controlled and therefore the more efficient the technique becomes.
Image by Graham Marsden via FlickrI solved the problem of feeding crusts at long range by mixing dry crusts in with a few balls of groundbait. The groundbait was mixed so that it dissolved quite rapidly on the bottom and released the crusts to rise to the surface. I packed as many crusts into the groundbait balls as I could get away with.
The bottom line was that it worked like a dream; both the method and the feeding technique, and I caught plenty of rudd to almost 3lbs over a period of several weeks.
My first efforts at surface fishing for carp also led me to a method I still use to this day, only slightly modified from the original rig.
As usual, I began by catching a fair number of carp on a freelined crust, and then, when the carp had travelled the learning curve, found I was watching them take all the free offerings and perhaps just one of the hooked ones before they spooked. Close observation revealed though, that they were being crafty and knocking the hooked crust about enough to cause crumbs to fall off it and sink towards the bottom, which they grabbed on the way down.
So I tied up a two-hook rig which had a big hook on the surface carrying a big crust, and a smaller hook 4ins below it carrying a piece of pinched flake simulating a piece that was sinking from the crust. They fell for it hook, line, and particularly the sinker!
I was concerned for some time that the rig could lead to some damage to a hooked fish; the loose hook fouling a snag and tethering the fish to it. But I was using it in a snag-free water and never did have any trouble. I would be wary of this, however, and think carefully before you use the rig. Also, be wary of the fish thrashing in the landing net, causing the loose hook to snag the mesh. What I do is immediately cut off the loose hook before I place the landing net down on the unhooking mat. Tying on a new hook-length is a small price to pay for being able to use an effective method without risk of damaging the fish.
The floater-fishing method I use most of the time today is the straightforward controller approach, although I accept that controllers often spook the carp as much as anything. No controller and watching the bait through binoculars is no doubt the best method of bite detection, and can't be faulted when you know carp are showing in your baited area, but there is no way I want a pair of binoculars stuck to my eyes for hours on end waiting for that bite 'out of the blue'.
Like so many other types of fishing though, the way you loose feed can make the difference between success and failure. My way is to choose a position where I have my back to the wind and loose feed with trout pellet and hookbait samples (usually Chum Mixer) in the same way I would loose feed with maggot or caster when fishing stick float on the river. Little and often is the answer, or quite a lot and often if you are fishing a prolific carp water, for they can mop up a hell of a lot of feed if they're well onto it. Whichever - little and often, or a lot and often - the aim is to keep a constant stream of bait bobbing along the surface, to such an extent the carp grow over-confident and therefore careless. Feeding for twenty minutes or so before you actually wet a hookbait is the best way, which allows the carp to grow confident before any of them are hauled off to a landing net, and therefore remain confident for longer.
If you get the feeding technique right, on the right day, you can hook the carp on almost any floater method, within reason of course. They become so preoccupied with feeding, and competing with each other if you get enough carp in the area, their sense of self-preservation goes out of the window to a great extent. Ask any match angler, he'll tell you that correct feeding technique is more than half the battle.
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