One of the most successful tactics for those in the know over the past few years has been the use of large beds of cooked hempseed with a hook bait of cooked maize, sweetcorn or Enterprise Artificial Sweetcorn.
Here’s how to get then going on your local water.
Soak three or four kilos of hemp seed in a bucket of cold water for 12 hours. After the soak, transfer the seeds to a cooking vessel and bring them to the boil. Once boiling strongly turn of the heat, transfer them to a decent freezer box and allow them to stand overnight. This ensures that the seed is cooked to perfection.
Add a small tin of sweetcorn to each four kilos of cooked hemp seed. Corn will be fine as a hookbait for short range or margin fishing but a tougher bait is needed when fishing at range. Maize is ideal in these situations. To prepare maize for hookbaits simply soak a few ounces in strongly flavoured water overnight. The grains will swell up and absorb the flavour and water well, but they will still be very hard and will withstand the force of the cast indefinitely.
For a bottom bait use two or three grains of maize in a short hooklink of no more than 10cm. If you want to fish a popped up hookbait use a couple of Grains of the Enterprise artificial corn. You can draw attention still further to the hookbait by using a small PVA bag filled with Haith’s SuperSoft pellets.
The best way to fish the method is to concentrate three separate, well defined areas and fish one rod to each spot. This is better than concentrating all three rods in one spot as there is less risk of spooking the fish from three separate baited areas than from one single one.
This beauty from Le Queroy liked her hemp seed!
Written by Ken Townley
