Bait According To... Tom Dove

The bait that changed everything for me was the Cell. Never before has there been a more versatile bait! A very special bait that can be used at any time of the year with the same success rate, and for some reason it never ever blows. Before Cell came along we’d always talk about what month in the autumn/winter to move over to your ‘winter bait’. That’s now a thing of the past so you get to fish and build confidence in something all the way through the year.

The game-changing baiting tweak which altered everything for me was to add natural food into my mix at certain times of the year. Fish adore natural food like casters and maggots, so add them with your boilies and particles, especially in the summer months if you can get away with it with nuisance fish. Natural baits are very much seen as a winter add-on but they actually work very well in the height of summer if you can manage it.

The last bait-related item I bought and loved was a vegetable chopper for worms! It’s a brutal ol’ world out there.

 A bait-related item I would never part with has to be the Spomb. There’s something lovely about getting a spot going on the Spomb/spod, hitting the clip nicely, three rods right next to each other, pretending to be as good as Tom Maker. Just thinking about it is making my willy twitch.

I’d love to be able to go back to fishing boilies with the throwing stick, but the seagulls are such a problem at most venues nowadays that it’s a bit of a lost art. If we could design something that scares the birds away, well, then we can go back to fishing big spreads of boilies and catching all the big ‘uns.

I have an excessive collection of hookbaits! My fishing bag is really quite small; I always try to take as little with me as possible, but even with limited space, by the end of the year I manage to fill half of that space with pots of pop-ups. Of course 99% I don’t use, and the other 1% being pineapple pop-ups. 

To be honest, there isn’t a bait I long to use again. I think bait and fishing in general has moved on so much that everything available now is better than it was before. 

The best piece of bait-related advice I have been given in the past year? Hmm… nobody gives me advice—I clearly need better mates. One of the things that has become more and more apparent to me, though, is that you should almost always start with a small amount of free bait and then work your way up once you get bites. I’ve often lived to regret putting too much out at the beginning of a session, getting overexcited thinking they’ll smash through it straight away and they often don’t. Even if you’re there to catch 10, the first 2 will come much quicker with a smaller amount of bait.

My preferred baiting approach nowadays is three Medium Spombs very accurately, smack bang over my hookbait.

In my bait bag you will always find pineapple pop-ups, sweetcorn and Cell. Those three are enough to take on the world. All have years of testing and years of proof they work which eliminates any doubt.

My preferred hookbait colour is yellow! I do sometimes move over to a nice washed out, off-white if I’m fishing lots of boilies over a week’s session. But for some reason yellow seems to be the best of the best. It’s very important that it’s a dull yellow too, not a fluoro bright yellow—a nice mustard colour.

My preferred free food size is 10mm in a Spomb, 15mm in a throwing stick in the UK and 20mms overseas.

My best bait edge is find something you trust and don’t doubt it! Good anglers aren’t riddled with doubt, they find something they know works and then try their hardest to put it in front of some carp.