How we won a boilie match at Harsány — tactics and baiting

Four days of match fishing at Harsány, at the Etalon Baits TOP 3 event, where a team's three largest fish count and nothing under 15 kg is even weighed. The team was Viktor and Tibike, and the swim they drew was the one the channel's first Harsány film came from: deep water, with the sun out of their eyes.

The first two days went badly, which is the useful half of the video. The marker sat at 108–112 m on the hard bottom and the bait went out over a wide area around it. Five fish came, not one of them reaching the 15 kg minimum — the best fell 100 grams short at 14.9.

The turn came from the neighbours, who were catching on the same water. They did two things differently: they fished closer, at 90 m, and they baited very tightly. The team copied both. The marker came back to 90 m, onto a transition between the harder bottom and the silt — and with wind and a cold front forecast, the shorter cast was the reliable one anyway.

From then on the feed went into roughly a two-metre circle around the buoy, with halved and whole boilies scattered only around that. The particles were soaked overnight in SBS Red One and in M1 Spod Juice — itself a trick learned from a neighbouring swim at the previous year's match. The mix was Premium Magmix Ínyenc, tiger nut based, topped up with scalded rapeseed, plus sweetcorn early on and no other corn at all. One thing has changed since filming: the lake no longer allows a seed mix brought from home, only particles cooked fresh on site.

Accuracy was its own discipline: in the wind he recast the same rod up to five times until the rig landed within 30–50 cm of the buoy, and that is where the takes came from.

One bait above all: M1. Either a 20 mm M1 boilie capped with an M1 Mini Method pop-up, or the same boilie with a red M1 pop-up beside it. The theory offered in the video is that Etalon's Spiceica is fed heavily at Harsány, and M1 is a similar spiced profile in a different aroma and colour — the fish may have grown wary of one and not the other. They fed both. The rig was a spinner rig throughout, and the video makes a point most anglers miss: a spinner rig fishes a bottom bait just as well as a pop-up.

The fish switched on with Friday's cold front, exactly as the team hoped and exactly as it had gone in their previous Harsány film after three days of nothing. That evening the twenties came one after another — 23.85, 22.80 and the rest, twenty-odd fish across the four days. The fish that settled the match came in the closing hours, out of a double take: Viktor played one rod while Tibike lifted the other.

The final tally was 66.6 kg for the best three, enough for first place — narrowly, since either of the two neighbouring swims could have gone ahead with a single larger fish. The biggest-fish prize went to the same team, with a 23.85 kg long-framed common. One detail worth keeping: no fish under 25 kg had ever taken that prize at Harsány before, which the organisers put down to the quiet spell that follows spawning.