Here’s a nice pike caught on one of angling’s forgotten techniques – drifter float fishing.

  

 

 It is more than twenty years since Eddie Turner first wrote about drifter float fishing whereby the bait is suspended underneath a special vaned float. Because the float has a vane it can be drifted a long, long way – it goes without saying that drifter floats will only work if the wind is behind you and not blowing toward you.

To move a drifter a light breeze is ideal. Of course, they will fish in a big wave but in these conditions the wind is often so strong that it pushes the float and bait too quickly to make the presentation appear natural to pike.

The new generation of Fox Drifters come fitted with a drifter extension, allowing the float to be fished bottom end only as opposed to the old fashioned way of top and bottom. This helps whe trying to control the pace of the float.

When fishing with the drifter float it is important to use a line that floats. In the old days we used mono greased up with vaseline or line grease to make it float. Nowadays we use braid – it requires no treatment and when it comes to setting the hooks at a hundred metres or more, a few turns of the reel handle and you are in business (gone are the days when we used to have to wind and run backwards to try to set the hooks).

The bait (either live or dead) is fixed to fish off the bottom. In lakes with varying depths this can be tricky and in these circumstances the best tactic is to set the float shallower than the shallowest part of the area your drifting over. Best results often come with the bait fished within a meter of the bottom but I have also had fish come very high. The pike in the opening photograph was caught by fishing the bait twelve feet deep over thirty feet of water.