As part of Dan O’Neill’s River Whispers series, Anthony O’Neill is back this week and has some advice on Roach. It’s such a wonderful gentle fish that starts quite a few anglers on their journey. Dan and Anthony have did quite a few roach trips over the winter and early spring. They fished the Barrow mostly for these wonderful fish. Often attracting Mr. Pike but that’s for another day…
Anthony on the roach
“My dad enjoys fishing for roach and I watched him catch some nice ones. They fought quite hard so I wanted to try for them. My set up was light, I used a 10ft pellet waggler with 3-pound line. I then used a light waggler float.
In the winter when I fish roach I am careful about how much ground bait I put in as sometimes too much would put the fish off, we found. We use different combinations that include dampened layers pellet, hemp seed, stewed wheat, chopped worm, breadcrumbs, sweetcorn and some crumbled clay to add weight. Sometimes we would use sand instead.
Before adding the ground bait, we would plumb the depth along the swim to see if there were any deeper spots and also to ensure our hook bait ran along the bottom or even a little bit higher if we needed to.
My biggest roach was from the River Barrow. It was 1.5 pounds. It was a very pretty fish and fought very hard.”
Go fishing…
