I would alternate these baits until I had established which was working the best

Naturally with anything new or foreign there was terrific opposition to hemp leading to various bans. Stories of hemp drugging fish were still very common when I first started using the bait in the late 1950’s.When I started trotting the Thames with hempseed, I would buy a shillings worth of mixed cooked hemp with a few tares from Dave Steuart’s shop in Richmond upon Thames. I would fish at low tide at Twickenham Embankment, starting to feed as I set my tackle up. This consisted of a trotting rod, centre pin reel and balsa float, with all the shot bulked to stop the fish taking the shot. I would normally fish with a size 14 hook baited with a grain of hemp or a small tare. I would alternate these baits until I had established which was working the best. However I must stress that the hemp we were using at this time is what now is referred to as “giant hemp” and therefore much easier to fish on the hook. I would start off fishing deep but be prepared to come up as the fish started to take ‘on the drop’. Bites were notoriously fast and violent, requiring good co-ordination with excellent tackle control. Float fishing with hemp certainly helped sharpen up the float fishing skills whilst often producing good bags of quality roach and dace. Many of the roach were over the pound mark and sometimes in excess of a pound and a half.Up until the early 1960’s, hemp was regarded as a float fishing bait, only fit for roach and dace. When I started experimenting legering with hemp in the early sixties many locals thought that I had literally gone mad. Then I started to leger hemp on a fast flowing Thames back water, with Dave Stroud, to catch bags of barbel. The technique was to bait up a swim using a bait dropper with hemp. The tackle was a 10ft 1lb test curve hollow glass rod with a fixed spool reel loaded with 61b b.s. line. The terminal gear was a running lead with a size 12 hook baited with two grains of hemp. Bites were often a shivering sensation down the rod that acted as a warning followed by a violent pull. This made the bites virtually unmissable. This approach accounted for mainly barbel with the odd good dace. As regards size it accounted for Thames barbel to just over 91b with bags of barbel containing up to 12 individual fish. At this time, the Throop Fishery on the Dorset Stour was starting to produce some very big barbel on this method. Gradually the pulling power of hempseed for species other than roach and dace was being recognised. It did not take long for anglers to realise that other baits also worked well over a bed of hemp. Unfortunately there was a great shortage of the large Chilean hemp that we all had been using and we were forced to use smaller hempseeds. These were so much smaller that they were difficult to fish on the hook. Most anglers therefor changed to fishing other baits on the hook over the smaller hemp that was still a brilliant fish attractor.Over the last few years the large Chilean hemp has become much more freely available which is good news for hemp fisherman. I was temporarily lost for words when I visited my local seed merchant, Percy Chapmans and saw the monstrous Chilean hemp that we had in stock. I now used this as hook bait and feed in a mixture of the cheaper smaller hemp with a little of the larger hemp. As this Chilean hemp is so much larger than the hemp we have become used to, it is worth reminding readers that it is best to soak the new large hemp for twenty-four hours before cooking. I then cook it with a half a tea spoon full of sodium bicarbonate (sodium hydrogen carbonate or baking soda) to make it darker when cooked and a tea spoon of sugar to sweeten it. This is not the only way to cook it but it works well for me and I am pleased with the final product.In the late sixties, casters became the “in bait”. Casters were generally worked in conjunction with hemp seed. Both baits appeared to work well together producing results that were often superior to those obtained if either bait had been used on its own. Matches on rivers were dominated by catches made on hemp and caster. On the non tidal Thames matches it became rare for top weights not to be falling to anglers using hemp and casters. However, on the tidal river below Teddington this was not always the case. Although hemp and caster worked well at times, the deadly combination was often bettered by anglers using large quantities of white maggots, or the humble loaf of bread. Certainly an odd observation and one that is difficult to explain – perhaps the brackist nature of the water had some effect.On clear low water conditions on the Upper Kennet, I tried out hemp and casters as an alternative to wet bread, though wet bread when the river is running off after a flood is not as good as when the water is low and stale. It was under these conditions that I fished the Upper Kennet with hemp and caster in late 1968 to catch 421b of roach with individual specimens up to 21b 3oz. This was sufficient to win the “Roach Fisherman of England” competition run by Shakespeare. Friends who were fishing wet bread did not do as well in those stale water conditions and were surprised how well the hemp and caster worked in those somewhat adverse conditions.Shortly after we moved on to Reading and District sections of the River Kennet using hemp and caster. However I must stress that this was far more hemp than caster. We would take up to 10 pints of hemp with us as feed, to only one or two pints of caster. We would use powerful 12ft trotting rods with centre pins loaded with 4 or 51b line to trot a heavy stick float with two casters on a size 14 hook through the swim. We would start off by placing six bait droppers full of feed at the top of the swim and then trot through fishing over depth and holding back. Bites were normally violent and plentiful with catches of up to 32 barbel in a day. These fish were smaller but more plentiful than on the Kennet today. Doubles were exceptionally rare in those days and I only managed the one double of 101b 6oz in those years. It certainly was terrific sport and made all the better by being on float fished centre pin tactics.Up until the mid to late sixties, hemp or hemp with tares had been used on many still waters in Summer to produce good bags of roach. Then a roach disease appeared to strike the area. The first waters to be affected were the M.W.B. reservoirs. At that time I used to fish the Queen Mary Reservoir at Staines. Up until 1964 I was catching roach that averaged nearly two pounds, then after 1965 I never saw another roach caught from a M.W.B. reservoir again. In fact I don’t know of any angler claiming to have caught a roach since that year from any of our local reservoirs. The roach on the reservoirs were mainly caught on bread but the disappearance and subsequent loss of roach did affect the use of hemp on still waters.In the early seventies, we started to use hemp and casters on local gravel pits for tench. The great advantage of these baits is that they both stayed on the bottom and, unlike maggots, would not bury themselves. The tackle was kept simple with a matched pair of 1lft rods with a test curve of just over a pound with fixed spool reels loaded with 51b b.s. line. The terminal rig was a running paternoster with three casters on a size 12 hook. These were not bolt rigs and we fished them with a light butt indicator. Bites were slow pulls rather than the violent takes associated with bolt rigs. Results were good and showed steady improvement over the next fifteen years. Initially the tench averaged 41b 8oz but fifteen years later, although we were catching fewer fish, the average had increased to 61b 2oz. As the tench increased in average size, the roach disappeared from the majority of the waters that we were fishing.Although prebaiting was not always necessary it certainly appeared to improve catches. I normally prebaited in those days for a week, placing a pint of hemp with a few casters in the swim every day. I remember starting at 4 a.m. on the Saturday after the opening of the season. I had prebaited a swim on a shelf with 14ft of water in front of it. I started off by catapulting out about half a pint of mixed hemp and fresh casters along the side of the shelf in about 4 or 5 ft of water. In less than half an hour, I could see lots of small bubbles created by feeding tench entering the swim and did not have to wait long before one of the butt indicators moved towards the butt ring. I struck and landed my first tench of 61b 4oz. As that fish was quickly netted and returned, my other rod produced another bite to produce another good tench. Sport was good and I went on to catch 9 tench, a bream of 61b 4oz and a carp of just under ten pound. I was pleased but surprised at the carp as the venue held very few of them. However this type of catch became rather common with carp becoming more than an occasional visitor. Naturally we were very pleased with the big tench but rather surprised at those carp.I decided to try hemp on a water that held more carp. I started off prebaiting with hemp and no casters as I wanted to keep the cost down. I set up with traditional carp tackle with a semi fixed lead. The terminal tackle was three hairs with up to 12 hemp seeds glued on to the hook. In hot weather this worked very well producing some nice carp. Then I tried fishing it as a pop up. For this a piece of tungsten putty was on the trace to weigh down the cork ball that was hair rigged to the hook. Before Krysten bogey was available, I used to glue the seeds on to the ball but in all honesty, it is now much easier with Krysten bogey. This also worked well and I still regularly use it.Although I still use hemp for roach in Summer, I use it much more for other species including barbel, chub, tench and carp. However the story of hemp does not end here as recent developments have opened up new horizons. Now that good quality hemp is available in cans it has become a convenience bait. I always carry a can with me and it has enabled me to use hemp when on holiday.An even more recent development is the hemp pellet. I have tried the new Richworth hemp pellets out with great success and believe that they could revolutionise my fishing particularly when I prebait before fishing down the edge for carp. They appear to work as well if not better than conventional trout pellets. They also work exceptionally well mixed with trout pellets. Certainly my results to date indicate that this mixture of pellets has great potential. It also goes some way to nullify, Dr Bruno Broughton’s criticism of using only trout pellet. This way fish are given a variety of feed.This year, I intend using these hemp pellets in a variety of rolls including mixed with trout pellet as a feed for carp and tench. I have not yet had the opportunity of using them in running water but will use them in the new season. They could work well in a number of running water applications for a whole range of species including roach and barbel.

Although hemp is a bait that has been in use in this country for nearly a hundred years, there is still much to learn about its use. New developments, including cans of cooked hemp and hemp pellets, no doubt, will extend the uses of this well known bait.