Bang on the money

I’m not a big fan of spodding, it just doesn’t suit my preferred styles of fishing but earlier in the year I was shown a little bait delivery system called a mini Spomb. Basically it is a spring loaded, bomb shaped device that you fill with bait and cast out. Once it hits the surface a button on the front activates a catch so the Spomb springs opens and the bait falls to the bottom.

I was fishing a water called Lakeside Caravan Park at the time, and I immediately saw a use for the mini Spomb. Lakeside is a very well run, very well stocked water, near Pocklington, East Yorkshire, with a large head of carp, big chub, tench, bream, ide etc. Most anglers fish on the pole, or small feeder, so the open water further out gets very little pressure. I thought it was worth trying the open water and the mini Spomb seemed like the ideal way to get small quantities of bait out to where I wanted to fish.

You don’t need any specialist rods and reels for the mini Spomb as it can be cast with any medium power carp rod, but in conversation with Stephen McCaveny, Daiwa’s Marketing Manager he suggested that a shorter spinning rod might be the perfect tool to cast a loaded mini Spomb, and he offered to send one through for me to try. A few days later I had my hands on a 10ft TriForce Spinning rod. I paired it up with a Regal Z 4000BRi loaded with 30lb Tournament 8 Green Braid. Time to go fishing.

It’s fair to say that I was blown away with just how well the Triforce/Regal combo performed. I was comfortably achieving distances far greater than I had hoped for. I was very impressed.

Having talked to Kevin Green editor of Improve Your Coarse Fishing magazine about the action I was getting he arranged to join me at Lakeside for the day, and do a feature on the tactics I was using. On the day, we had the weirdest of weather, very cold to start with, then very sunny, wind all over the place, then calm, not my idea of perfect fishing conditions but we had a great day and I caught chub, tench, bream and carp with the mini Spomb baiting approach. I was using a combination of maggots, sweetcorn, and small pellets, in the mini Spomb and fished a combination of sweetcorn and maggots on the hook. (If you want to read Kevin’s full write-up of the session with more detailed descriptions of rigs and tactics it was in the April/May edition, Number 258).

I have used the Triforce/Regal/mini Spomb set-up several times since and it is becoming a regular feature in my fishing, it has so many potential uses, not only for accurate baiting up at the start of a session when bottom fishing, but it’s perfect for quick easy topping up after a fish without causing too much disturbance. I’ve also been using it for putting out floaters and it is brilliant.

Now to the amazing bit. A couple of my angling friends have seen me with my new rod, have had a cast or two, been as impressed as I was when I first had a cast and asked the obvious question, how much is that rod. As Daiwa had sent me the Triforce to try I didn’t know, so I had a look in the catalogue, under £30, I couldn’t believe it. For those fed up with spod spillage or trying to catapult accurately at range, this could just be the perfect solution that won’t break the budget.

Brian Skoyles