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Dave Lane's Winter Tweaks! Posted by Dave Lane

Dave Lane explains the small tweaks and adjustments he makes to his approach throughout the cooler months!

When the temperatures drop in winter and the all-important bites times are reduced in size and frequency, you really need to know that what is out in the pond is not going to let you down at these crucial times. For that reason, I generally keep to proven methods, tactics and baits even if I do tweak or adapt them for the lesser than favourable conditions.

If I am using boilies, as I usually do on at least one rod in winter, I like to change it up a bit from my normal Summer and Autumn approach of whole baits and spend some extra time preparing my baits, chopping and grinding to achieve a mixed sized approach. Nowadays there are many different commercially available bait choppers on the market for just this application. I have a big wind-up chopper from Ridge Monkey that will render a bag of boilies down to a mixed crumb in no time at all, but I find that the finished product is a bit too fine for the whole mix, therefore I have also bought a simple vegetable chopper from Amazon that has interchangeable blades and I use his to simply quarter some of the baits as well.

To this I add a few Response Pellets, some 10mm boilies, the odd 15mm whole and halved ones and, hey presto, I have a bucket full of decent quality boilies that are all shapes and sizes from crumb right up to whole baits. Adding attraction to boost what may be a delivery of food quite small in quantity is also a good idea - an area where liquids can really come into their own with a sensory appeal dispersing into the water column. So, I always add a liquid attractor to the finished mix, at the moment I am using a combination of the new 'Smart Liquids' and the old faithful 'Activator' both matched to the main bait, which just happens to be the Cell for this winter. Confidence in your bait is absolutely crucial at this time of year and you cannot beat a tried and trusted formula.

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