It’s surface fishing time and our editor shares a great tip to help you feed mixers and floating pellets beyond usual catapult range…

They’re light, so they don’t go particularly far when you catapult them out – surface baits are not the easiest to bait with at any kind of range. You can spod them, but that creates disturbance and attracts every gull, duck and coot in the county. So how do you get round this problem?

The answer is pretty simple and it was something I first saw when out shooting a feature with Terry Hearn about 12 years ago!

You’ll need some stocking-type PVA, your floaters and a few dry stones. It’s important that they are dry and they need to be about walnut size or a little smaller, but try and find heavy ones.

Tie up some bags of floaters and simply add one of the stones to each bag. This adds weight to the bags and gives you way more distance when cattying them out. Try it, you won’t believe how much further the bags go.

There is another double-headed advantage to the tactic. If the stones are heavy enough, the bags sink a little when they first hit the water. This cannot only throw the birds off the scent but also, if the bag splits underwater it creates a nice group of rising baits in the water. I’ve done this with really heavy stones in bags, getting them to sink quite deep and then send the baits rising to the surface. I’m not saying it will definitely get you extra bites, but it has worked for me.

You can grab your stocking PVA here