Given the atrocious cold, wet and windy conditions before us, anglers who are venturing out are, as would be expected, finding things a great deal more difficult when it comes to making a bite or two.

Like many, keen as ever within the later part of my angling career, never a day goes by when I don’t feel the urge to try or do my best to get out and put something together that will hopefully make a few more bites than those around me.

Especially when it comes to the competition stage.

This comes to mind after yet another long discussion that we anglers very often get embroiled within. One that very often attracts criticism towards any fishery within arm’s length or an area needlessly targeted because the fishing is tough.

As we all know though, fishing at this time of year is always hard. Fish become less active and they simply don’t need to feed as the temperatures drop and on some venues, they just become somewhat dormant.

However, on those waters where we do make a ‘bite or two during the winter, putting aside the assumption that it will only be a matter of time before the fish turn up, one way to elevate a possible blank is to also work on adapting your tackle to suit.

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For many, particularly canal anglers, just changing our presentation can be the pathway to success. On being successful on making bites when the going is tough by means of adapting and developing changes to tackle, very often by also searching the peg for a better stamp of fish, it can be found they may be just laying there before you even when you’re actually on a ‘bite a chuck’ from small fish.

Even on the most dominant of pegs on a fishery, pegs where anglers are confident that they will make bites anywhere on whatever is put before them, when it is cold and the clarity of the water is crystal clear, this very often isn’t the case. It can always be difficult.

This is a time when we must always warn ourselves of what could be before us if we ignore the basics of taking the natural elements for granted.

On the shallow, clear canals during winter, fish, particularly roach and skimmers are species that will always present themselves to be cautious and cagey in winter.

Very often by fish not making their whereabouts known to us as they would do in summer, we anglers simply have to search for them during the winter in places where we could find them laying within a thermal stratification level anywhere before us.

With this, the debate turned towards understanding the basics of simply searching for fish, a slower drop of the hook bait when presenting it to whatever species may be targeted was discussed.

Lighter lines, smaller hooks and a presentation delivered by allowing the timescale of the bait to be falling through the water to be extended, by means of spreading the rig shotting, any fish that it may be put before would in essence be naturally attracted.

Fishing at different depths will also present a hook bait being clear of any debris and make it much more visible and tempting and enabling us to search those all important stratification lines I’ve mentioned earlier, where crucially the fish may just be secretly laying.

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