Alexandru ‘Andy’ Sivu

Personal profile

I’ve been fishing since I was 15 years old and I really do think I am among the very first proper “carp anglers” in Romania. When I started off, I was basically like a sponge taking in everything that came from the UK – gear, baits, tactics you name it.

Naturally I started off with regular casting, but as the years passed I’ve really seen the advantages of using a boat in my fishing: you can cover more water, you can use an echo sounder to really understand where you are fishing, you can present your baits better, you can control the fish better and you also have a far larger pallet of baiting strategies available to you.

I’ve fished pretty much every readymade boilies from all the major companies out there. I was getting decently good results, but I always had the nagging feeling something was holding me back, particularly over long sessions where I saw large chunks of time that should have been producing, but weren’t. I started to realize that this was an inherent weakness in readymade boilies that they couldn’t really keep up over long sessions and it was a problem increasingly visible in lakes where I faced tough competition and the fish kept getting fresh baits. Since this was the majority of my fishing, I had to up my game.

Fishing with Select Baits just came naturally, more than three years ago, when the company itself was born. They highly nutritional fishmeal boilies are exactly how I would approach my own bait making, and the Hot Fish range almost seemed as if it was made just for me.

I fish as much as I can every year from the first defrost to the first frost or until the bailiffs send me home. I usually go for long sessions, very rarely less than 5 days. I know this sounds an awful lot for most people, but I simply have noticed that longer sessions give anglers the upper hand and that catch rates increase progressively.

In my own fishing I pay extreme attention to the last few meters of tackle – the leader and the rig. Since they are the ones that really bring you in contact with the fish, I would never ever compromise on quality here.