Dan Whitfield

Barbel feed hardest through autumn, and the fish are at their heaviest. Here is how flow and water temperature change where they sit, and why the first floods are worth planning around.

Chub feed harder in autumn than at any other time, and rising coloured water is an opportunity rather than a problem. Here is where they sit when the river comes up and what to put in front of them.

Water temperature changes what fish want more than any other factor. Here is how my bait choices shift across a full year on UK waters.

Badly prepared particles can genuinely harm fish, and badly stored bait costs you bites. Neither takes much effort to get right.

A bag of supermarket prawns costs a couple of pounds and catches perch, chub, barbel and carp. It is the best change bait in coarse fishing.

Cheesepaste, bread paste and meat paste predate every modern bait on the shelf, and on cold water they still do things a boilie cannot.

Both get treated as accidental captures. Both reward being targeted deliberately, and the bait approach for each is almost the opposite of the other.

Catching roach is easy. Catching big roach consistently is one of the hardest things in coarse fishing, and bait is a big part of the difference.

Barbel bait has to survive a strong current and small fish long enough for a barbel to find it. That single requirement explains most of the list.

Chub will eat cheese, bread, worms, slugs and lumps of luncheon meat. That freedom is exactly why anglers get chub bait wrong.