I don't think there is one hookbait more singularly associated with a particular species than hemp. Hemp is a roach bait, right? Well, no. A recent trip out with my good friend, and top angling writer, Dom Garnett, revealed that silver bream are absolute suckers for the seed and, it turns out, elderberries too.
If you live in Somerset and have never caught a silver bream then my response to that is that you probably don't know what one looks like! They are everywhere. In fact I'm convinced that the tiny 'skimmers' we used to catch on the Lee Navigation where I grew up in North London were actually silver bream. That is also the place where I first saw elderberries in use. My dad was a big fan, and used to catch roach from the Lee that you would never have known were there without using hemp, or a combination of the two. Anyway, I digress, there are silver bream everywhere on the Somerset Levels. In the canals, rivers and even some commercials.
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The Bridgwater Docks were a mass of dimpling roach and rudd on our arrival; a relatively late start as it had easily passed midday. We both set up waggler rods and I perched myself on the edge of a high wall, fishing no more than a few rodlengths out. Some groundbait was introduced whilst maggots, casters and hemp were loosefed over the top. Predictably, the roach, rudd and perch started coming, along with, of course, silver bream.
Attempts were made to sort out the better fish on casters and corn but there was no concrete evidence to suggest any one bait was better than the others. I began loosefeeding hemp, and whilst it took an unusually short period of time to start catching on this classically slow bait, the fish were small. It was at this point that Dom found the answer, an elderberry bush, situated on his left shoulder! Within the first three casts on an decent sized elderberry I managed a 4oz silver bream, a 10oz rudd and that belter of a roach pictured above, which must have been getting on for 1lb. A similarly sized silver bream later followed (below), and Dom even hooked and lost an unseen lump, with us both fancying a tench as the culprit.
Thanks to Dom, I have some cracking pictures of our outing to the Docks, but this did mean that my own SLR failed to make it out of the camera bag again. Fortunately, amidst a busy time of late, I also snuck in a three hour stint on the Grand Western Canal closer to home. Drab weather didn't make for brilliant photography but I was able to mess around with the manual settings and get one or two half-decent shots of surroundings:
Red maggots were the order of the day (partly because I couldn't get hold of anything else), and a softly, softly approach. I started with no initial feed and instead decided to trickle in bait using a kinder pot. This involved a walnut sized pinch of active Supermatch and a few grains of hemp, as well as, of course, red maggots.
I was into perch right away on a single line down the middle, and later added roach, rudd and a 3lb tench. I soon found that my regular groundbait clouding the water was a magnet for pike, attracted as they were by the activity surrounding masses of motherless minnows. There's no mistaking a pike when you hook them on the pole for it often takes them quite a while to work out what is going on. Usually they just rise in the water as you lift them before a couple of head shakes and a fierce sprint to the nearest cover. I lost one as well as landing one of 3-4lb - hooked fair and square in the top lip on double red maggot - reminding me why I always used to carry a few piking bits with me on any trip to the Grand Western Canal.
