Why Do We Use Small Pellets Instead Of Large In PVA bags?
After several years of being in the industry and doing numerous tests on PVA for various reasons I never really noticed how much the size of the pellets you use could affect the effectiveness of the rig.
I had always used a mixture of pellet mainly 4mm and above because that what was available. However a few years ago Jon Finch from Bankside Tackle had started to make available some really small pellets of 1mm in size. Myself, and a few other well-known anglers including Mark Hutchinson, were lucky enough to have a chance to test these for a while, before they went on sale.
The results were devastating and we caught absolutely everything that swam. I can remember doing a feature with Jonathon Bones from Total Carp and I caught 5 big Roach, a couple of double figure Bream, loads of Tench up to 9lb and a dozen Carp to 28lb in two nights. He said he had never seen so many big fish of so many different species all caught in the same session using the same method. Mark was experiencing similar results and we decided to only use the small pellets during the winter when the fishing got hard.
As soon as we stopped using the small pellets we stopped catching the Roach and not so many Tench and Bream, but worryingly our catches of Carp dropped off also. We decided to carry on using the small pellet and we started catching all sorts again. I thought it was purely down to the pellet.
It wasn’t until some time later that I discovered something strange which I believe had a major influence into our increased catch rate. I had done my normal PVA presentation to the kids at a junior carp camp and I had loads of different types of bags tied up that I had put into water tanks to show what the rigs had looked like as they enter the water and dissolve. I had used all sorts of pellets but also tied some up using the really small pellet. After the presentation and some hours later when I came to empty the tanks I noticed some thing completely different about how the rigs looked in the water.
The bags that had been tied up using the larger pellet were now well and truly spread out with large gaps forming in between the pellet; this in turn made the rig and lead visible. On the other hand the bags that had been tied up using the really small pellet had dissolved leaving the bait in very neat piles. There weren’t large gaps between the pellet and therefore you couldn’t see the rig or lead making it almost impossible for the fish to detect. Genius!
This I know has a major factor in how the fish will feed with confidence over a small pile of pellet and I now have a bag mix of pellet with nothing bigger than 3mm inside.
All of the fish shown in our photos are English fish caught during 2006 from Wellington Country Park. All fish have been caught using Temple Products PVA, Dynamite Baits and Monster Tiger Nut boilies.
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