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Perfect Presentation
John used to place back shot above his stick float for optimum float and bait control.
The Key To Winning… The two things that made all the difference to your results on the river here were feeding and presentation. Learning about these on this venue stood me in fantastic stead when tackling a range of other venues too. I still use the principles I learnt here in my commercial fishing, which I do every week these days. For me, the stick float was always the best way to catch on this venue. This method gave you endless presentation options compared to the waggler. Ideally, you needed to slow the bait down and ease it through the swim so that your bait was going through at around half the pace of the river. This needed to be done smoothly, however, and it was essential that the float went through in a straight line. If you jerked it through the swim, or held back too hard so that it dragged the float off its straight course, you wouldn’t catch half as many roach. One of the best ways to ensure that your float went through the swim smoothly was to actually hand peel the line off the spool. I’d trap it with my left-hand middle finger and feed off the line a
An effective trick of John’s was to back wind his stick float down the swim at his desired pace. [INSET] ‘Back in the day’ a Mitchell Match reel would have replaced these current models. few inches, sometimes less, at a time. The other trick that I started doing a little later, was to actually back wind the float down the swim. This involved casting out, leaving the anti-reverse off and controlling the float down the swim by slowly back winding, keeping in touch with the float all the
time. Since then, I’ve spoken to several other river men who use this technique on different venues. Hadrian Whittle has had some fantastic results by doing this on the Wye. I know he pays massive amounts of attention to presentation and slowing his rig and bait down, and smoothly putting it through the swim is still a big thing.
The quality of presentation that you could achieve depended very much on the conditions too. Often, there would be a downstream wind, and when this happened 90 per cent of the field wouldn’t even assemble a stick float and reached for the waggler instead, because you could catch fish on it and many matches were won on the waggler. However, I learnt several methods of getting good presentation on the stick float in poor conditions. The first thing to understand is that you only need good presentation over a small area of your swim. Typically, this is where your feed is landing on the bottom and it could be an area as small as a metre long. Once you find this area, you can try your best to get your presentation right in this small but important part of the swim. In a bad downstream wind, this often means casting downstream so that you have lots of line control over this important area of the swim. There’s no point wasting time running your rig all the way down to this area, and in poor conditions the wind would probably have blown the float off line by the time it got there. Instead, I’d find out where the killing zone was, and cast to just above it. I could then mend the line and control it over this short distance, concentrating on getting the perfect presentation over this vital part of the swim.
Back Shotting Having back shot above the float was a big help too. Any movement of the first couple of feet of line from the float upwards is sure to affect the presentation. By having one or two No8 shot anywhere from one to three feet above the float, you ensure the float is stable when running through and, especially
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