Make no mistake, a steady trickle of grubs through a swim will get the barbel nosing out of their cover and digging up the gravel better than anything else.
Maggots exert an almost hypnotic effect on barbell, and when allowed to feed in an unpressured situation they soon overcome much of their natural caution.
To create that feeding situation spend an hour or so casting just the feeder full of maggots without attaching my hooklength.
Only after you’ve created the feeding situation do you clip on the hooklength and get stuck in!
The maggot feeder works best in daylight where there is some degree of clarity in the water and this rig incorporates features designed to make it unobtrusive to a browsing fish. It is also tangle-free and casts like a missile!
The base of the rig is a 2oz Drennan oval blockend; this holds station in all but the fiercest currents and creates a perfect bolt effect when fished below a semi-fixed hooklength.
Use a marker pen to break up the profile of the feeder and combine it with a Korda Safe Zone leader. This is heavy and is fished directly above the feeder to pin down the rig and prevent line bites. If barbel rub the line they invariably spook and move back into cover; it could take another hour to get them out again, so in most situations I would advise pinning the line to the bottom above the rig when targeting barbel.
A size 12 Korum S3 hook gives the perfect combination of strength with subtlety at the business end, and I combine it with 45cm of Preston’s 0.192mm Grand Match fluorocarbon, which sinks like a stone and is almost totally invisible underwater – the perfect daytime trap.I use real maggots in the feeder to create the feeding frenzy, but Enterprise rubber grubs as hook baits, which help neutralise the weight of the hook and prevent repeated destruction by minnows and small silvers.
