Fox Lake

Fox Tactics & Tips

Of all the waters on the complex, Fox has shown that one particular method stands head and shoulders above all others as the way to go on it. In this instance, it's the parachute bag! This Lake has been fished by a large contingent of bait boat users for a number of years now and consequently it pays to keep things stealthy!

This is not to say that spodding and/or spombing do not work, just that the fish have grown accustomed to a quieter approach and will often shy away from too much noise from new arrivals in a swim. The parachute bag is simplicity in itself, basically being no more than a solid PVA bag on the end of your chosen rig, with the lead fished outside of it! The beauty of this is that it will follow the lead down to the Lakebed and then hover above it (due to the air trapped inside) until the Bag dissolves allowing the rig to settle gently on the spot with a nice compact area of pellet and/or boilie crumb surrounding it!

To sum up, this method can be used either dropped from the hopper of your bait boat or if you are casting, by simply reducing the size of the bag! To create the bag rig, simply select your hooklink material of choice and form a rig 8-12" in length. Attach a bait in the normal manner and then slide this down to the bottom of the bag and nick the hookpoint through from the inside out! I have found this method to be the best with regard to ensuring the hookpoint is never masked by any of the contents of the bag! Then fill the Bag 2/3 full with your choice of feed, shake the bag so that it's nice and compact and then while making sure that the hooklink is exiting from the centre of the opening, twist the Bag 2 or 3 times and then tie off the neck with 2 turns of PVA tape. Try not to do more than this as in deeper or colder water, there can be some residue left over! Finally, gently pull the end of the rig so that it's nice and taut and fold the neck of the bag over and lick / stick the edges to streamline it if you intend to cast it out?

Naturally a multitude of rigs and other methods will all work on Fox Lake but due to the abundance of silkweed and a bottom that comprises large areas of silt for the most part, the parachute bag is in my opinion, the best suited. The Fox Lake carp do also respond better to zig rigs than their counterparts in the other waters so if you're struggling for a bite it may pay to switch 1 rod on to this method and see if you can work out what level they're swimming at? Having dealt with which rigs are suitable, I would like to cover the best baiting strategy to employ on Fox. As mentioned in the overview, there are signal crayfish present in Fox so it is probably best to avoid using a large bed of boilies! Instead, most prefer to use a large amount of pellet, in the region of 1-3kg per rod, per Fish.

There is actually a proven scientific reason for this, crayfish have been around for many thousands of years and in their genetic make up is an instinct not to crawl over food to get to food, so with a big spread of Pellet surrounding your hookbait, you are in fact shielding it from them! They also have very small stomachs and given this, the best approach is to feed them off as it doesn't take long to do so. However, if you were to do this with boilies, they'd simply return at a later date to eat what they'd left the first time.

If you do it with pellet though, by the time they're hungry again, the pellet has dissolved so the Food signal had diminished greatly and hopefully they won't be attracted to your solitary hookbait! Finally, it may also be worth avoiding anything too fishy if you like to use Boilies. Mainline's Cell has proven to be very, very successful on Fox over the past few years, this combined with a pineapple juice pop up in a snowman presentation has accounted for literally hundreds if not, thousands of large carp