Leaderboard

Silt is a very forgiving substrate IMO. You can chuck almost anything in it if it's set to depth correctly. My favoured presentation is a nice bright 15 mm wafter fished on a clone rig (basically a dead simple D rig in 15 lb fluoro) approximately 8 inches in length, fished heli style with the top bead set to the depth of the silt, or just up from that. The lead plugs and pulls the leader (if you're using one...) down into the silt so the rig lays flat on top against the top bead. The plugged lead gives an awesome bolt effect and the runs you get are usually proper melters. A few 15 mm baits saturated in a glug/water mix (to prevent the on-take of silt) peppered around the area and you're good to go. Really simple, really effective. I actually go with a big lead to plug it into the silt as far as possible.

I like the sound of this... What colour tights? [emoji16] Sent from my HTC 10 using Tapatalk

Just off jnt 10 m56 mate. Good luck

For Ddgx - Luncheon meat and cork mushed up in tights is amazing and will cast miles [emoji41] occasionally I try to be really clever and fish the bait on a hair with a small shot in the hair loop. When I get it right the weight flips the bait so the hook is out of the water above the bait and sometimes it'll lift the last inch of line clear of the water as well.

Good question. It depends on the lake and it's an educated guess to a certain extent. First thing obviously is chuck a lead out there, see what kind of drop you get and how badly it's plugging. If it's a generally silty lake I might then have a lead about in the margins to compare, I normally find the silt in the edge is a little deeper than in the middle. A landing net handle can help here too. If it's just a silty spot in a relatively none silty lake the drop will normally tell you all you need to know. I used to play about with white string tied up the leader - cast out and the silt discolours the string giving you a good idea of the silt depth - I no longer do that however as it's a bit of a faff and tbh I don't think you need to be that accurate unless you're using stiff rigs (I moved to 15 lb from 25 lb fluoro for this reason). Tbh nowadays I'll normally just have a chuck about with the lead, I've been doing this a while so can get a pretty good idea doing just that. On the odd occasion when you find silt that's literally feet deep, you can limit plugging to say 10 inches or so by feathering the cast.

explain to a noddy, how do you gauge the depth of the silt if you are fishing say 50 or 60 yds out?

Can I slightly hijack this thread? But to expand the convo about surface fishing Bait and end setup, what's your go to? I have done a few short sessions on runs/stocky ponds with my son to give him the bug. It amazes me that even the small fish are so coy to my bait sometimes. Even feeding competitively so often I watch them sussing something is up. It also makes me very dubious about 'fake' baits. If I use a pretty convincing fake dog biscuit amongst free offerings I can sit back and watch the whole lot get cleared out sometimes without the fake one getting touched. They know! So then it's on to a tiny dab of superglue on a real biscuit, I quite often think they are sensing or touching the line coming away from the bait, or perhaps it's just not moving naturally when they mouth or move in on the bait. I love bread but it doesn't stay on long, so sometimes I like pita bread but again once it's soggy no good. Anyone got a recipe for softening biscuits for hooking. Bit of vaseline on the fluoro to make it float? I'm got some things to figure out as you can tell Sent from my HTC 10 using Tapatalk