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Dave Coster's How To – Get The Winning Edge With Pellets
At last we have super soft pellets that actually stay on the hook! New Durable Swim Stim Hookers from Dynamite are absolutely brilliant. They feature a soft, almost elastic nature, but are robust enough to withstand vigorous casting. This is a big bonus if you don’t want to fiddle about and waste time hair rigging baits, plus directly hooked pellets are often better for converting a higher percentage of takes from shy biters like tench and bream. The new pellets are available in 4mm and 6mm sizes, offering White Amino, Red Krill, Amino Original (brown) and F1 Sweet (light green).
Up until this point I have never before found a soft hooker pellet that can withstand the rigours of method feeder fishing. However, after testing the various new Dynamite Durable Hookers, that has now all changed. Whether leaving the hook bait exposed or burying it, I found it was still attached to the rig after casting method feeders out to the horizon. Even small fish activity didn’t knock these pellets off, which is a big bonus. Another thing I liked was you can bury a hook almost completely inside to hide it, but the pellets remain soft enough not to impede hooking when you get a take.
Normally if you try burying a soft hooker pellet inside the feeder’s loading - a top trick that usually fools the wariest of fish - it becomes detached from the hook. But with the new pellets this doesn’t happen. They stay attached and even merge in if you use micro pellets. In this instance I used a method mould, popping a directly hooked durable pellet in first, followed by a small handful of damp 2mm carp micros. After firmly pressing the feeder in the mould, when it emerged you could only vaguely see the main hook pellet. It had blended in with the smaller feed pellets around it.
Similarly, when using method groundbait instead of micro pellets, one of the brown coloured Amino Original hooker pellets was barely visible when using a mould. This has got to be a big advantage when fish are being fussy, mopping up free groundbait and ignoring any larger particles. Bits of groundbait tend to stick to Durable pellets anyway, helping to disguise them and making it even more likely they will be sucked in when a groundbait loading on a method feeder is being attacked. There’s enough of a colour choice to find a hooker that matches most popular groundbait hues.
But the best effect I could achieve happened by accident. I was trying to press a Durable pellet into a mould with 2mm damp micros, but the loading crumbled as I was taking everything out. I noticed that the hook pellet suddenly looked like a hedgehog, with smaller feed pellets stuck all over its surface. Subsequently I discovered by firmly pushing a Durable pellet into a bait box full of micros, it gets covered with them and most stay put during the cast, slowly melting off the main bait when it’s submerged in water. This creates a very impressive and unique fish attracting presentation.
