If you arrived at a lake and found that the previous anglers, for whatever reason, had either dumped lots of particle because they had it left over, or just used an enormous amount of pellet or particle as their tactics – what would you do?
Jim Kelly replies;
It is always difficult to know what to do unless you are at the lake and can observe what is happening e.g. fish activity.  My initial thoughts is that there is no point in just compounding the problem by adding more bait.
If I knew where they had fished I would initially try fishing a very bright fluro over the top of their bait, with no freebies introduced by me (an in your face bait to get the fishes attention).
The other alternative would be to employ a one fish at a time tactics and try small PVA bags in places that would naturally hold carp. If an area started to produce fish I would start to trickle some bait in and play it by ear. What I wouldn’t do is put a lot of bait in at the start.
Jim
Paul Cooper replies;
This is an all too often occurrence on commercial waters where anglers have too much bait and do not want to take it home with them, either because the bait has started to go off or they simply have taken far too much bait with them.
A lot of this is caused because too many anglers in magazines and on blogs are over stating how much bait would be required at a venue.  If they are the only ones on the lake a large amount of bait could be used but if there are say 6 to 8 anglers on a lake then the amount of bait should be drastically reduced.
Too answer your question; I have come across this problem on a number of occasions and IMO the only answer is;
  • fish another area of the lake
  • fish off the bed of bait that has been dumped
  • use single fluoro hook baits that are popped up
  • do not introduce any more bait until you think the previous anglers bait has been eaten.
This happens more often than not.  Often on some of the French lakes that I fish I do not start catching well until Wednesday or Thursday – and the reason is because of other anglers bait. It is simply a waiting game for the fish to finish off last weeks bait.
I hope this helps but really there is not much that you can do other than educate irresponsible anglers.
Paul