Gaz Fareham
The 'Baiting Game'
 In the last few years I have spent a lot of time fishing ‘day only’ venues, creeping around after dark listening for fish and putting a bit of bait here and there. Often I wouldn’t even get to fish most of the areas I’d baited but that really wasn’t an issue, If I know I am planning on spending the entire season or at least a good few months on a venue I am always keen to get a bait ‘established’ to some degree and I know it can only help my angling in the long run.
The Bait Issue
In terms of trying to establish a bait you can really be up against it at times, especially when there are other baiting teams fishing a water. The Park lake I have been fishing for the last few years had probably seen over 50k of the same bait a week through the summer and into autumn, impossible to compete with as an individual so all I could hope to do was to get enough of mine in so it was recognised that’s all. I’ve fished lakes in the past where this bait domination has happened and was fishing Redesmere in the 90’s when the Activ-8 first came out, probably 90% of the anglers on there that season were using it and the lake fished better than it had done for years, producing an unprecedented amount of fish for what is usually such a difficult venue. Everywhere they went that year they must have been finding the stuff! Having said that, if you are prepared to do your own thing the rewards can be there.
I suppose to some extent the bait you use will correspond to the type of fishing you are doing and I am really relating to fishing a campaign on one particular water here, and when having odd sessions on waters I don’t know well I will often take a few other bits and bobs with me, but more often than not my freezer is only ever full of one bait. I’ve used Mainline baits for as long as I can remember, early 90’s if I do recall rightly which was long before I became a field tester for them. I know using a quality bait is essential to my style of fishing but it is not something I ever worry about. There are so many different baits on the market these days that you will only confuse yourself if you do. Just what exactly can constitute an ‘edge’ anyway? In reality it is nothing more than marketing hype because they are all available of the shelf and everyone is using them, the only edges are in the application. I think the key points Mike Willmott put down in his book ‘Carp Life’ sum the issues up perfectly.
- Observation/Location
- Providing the carp with a quality food source.
- Applying it correctly.
Point 2 is the easiest of the three to fulfil, points 1 and 3 are the tricky and really crucial ones. Food baits like Activ-8, Fusion and the Grange will work absolutely anywhere you take them so it takes any bait dilemmas completely out of the equation, once I’ve decided on a particular bait for a water it is just a case of forgetting about it and concentrating on everything else, the bait becomes just a ‘constant’ and I want nothing less than 100% confidence in it for this type of fishing. When you are going possibly months between bites you just can’t afford to have any little niggling doubts at all.
Why use a food bait anyway? Well, these days on the busy day ticket waters in the UK establishing a bait is probably the last thing on most anglers minds, they are there for a weekend and want to get a few bites within that short time frame, hence why everyone goes for the hemp/maggot/pellet/particle type ‘bits’ approach, it is designed to incite a quick response and to be fair is often the best bet for a one off session. There’s no point sitting behind a bunch of inert little round balls when you could be behind a few gallon of maggot is there? Or is there…these approaches don’t do a lot for the carp nutritionally and, in the long run, I think really do make them more difficult to catch, look at the size of the hookbaits and delicacy of rigs we are having to fall back onto now on the waters that have been hammered on the ‘bits’, plus there is also the fact that that is what everyone is doing now so where does the advantage lie? For me, if you fish a water regularly a boilie approach is always going to be the way forward. It doesn’t have to be a lot but a trickle here and there in the right place a couple of times a week can produce brilliant results.
In Practice
I thought the Fusion would be perfect for my approach at the Park, a dark, fishmeal bait that is ideal for baiting heavily with, being relatively soft and easily digestible. I decided to go in with 18 and 20mm baits to combat the big head of bream, normally I’d rather opt for a mix of 10’s, 15’s and 18’s but it just wasn’t practical with the amount of silver fish. Although the bream were a pain, I liked the fact they were there, as any uneaten bait would always get cleared regardless, avoiding me leaving bait all over the show. It’s not always as easy as it sounds to trickle a bit of bait in here and there, especially on busy venues and you do have to be really careful not to interfere with anyone else’s fishing – the last thing anyone wants is to turn up in a swim unaware it’s full of bait.
My thinking was that with most people only baiting quite lightly while fishing, just using a little patch dropped from a boat or a light scattering with the stick or catty, I thought going entirely the other way and fishing over a lot might just help me winkle a few out, a ‘safe’ little spread just didn’t seem like the answer to me. Because I was travelling 150 miles to the venue nipping down to put a bit of bait in to prime a few areas just wasn’t an option so if I wanted to establish a bait it was going to have to be done while I was actually fishing. I’d have much rather put some in 2 or 3 days previous like I would do on a local water but it wasn’t viable, it was just a case of adapting my normal approach to deal with having to do a 300 mile round trip to the venue.
3-5 kilos of boilie for a day session might seem like a lot of bait but if you get a number of big fish feeding on it that will be gone in no time at all. By baiting after dark the areas were allowed to settle for a few hours with no lines in them and then my hookbaits would go out first thing in the morning, sometimes accompanied by a light scattering of fresh bait. By baiting a few different areas I normally had a few spots primed and ready to move onto depending on how things panned out. I’m sure it is was no coincidence that the times I really got on them was when I’d baited really heavily the night before. The fact that I was catching off the big beds of bait and then winkling odd ones out on stringers over pre-baited areas as well showed me without question it was worth the effort.
Baiting regularly with boilie is such an underused tactic because it is often cost prohibitive but I have always found it to be a brilliant way of winkling out the better fish and if you really want to do it, it is easy enough to knock up big quantities of a good quality food bait relatively cheaply, especially if you get your head together with a few mates and do it as a team. It does take a bit of work but that was how we all used to do it back in the day and nothing has changed since then, except you can get hold of ingredients easier and the rollers are better. I have to admit I am no bait guru, I’m an angler not a bait scientist and although I have read lots on the subject and understand the basics and importance of chemoreception, aminos, food values and the like I also understand that as long as it is a good one, it is more about how you use it.
I’ve always tried to make my angling as simple as I possibly can and fishing with reliable food baits and applying them over a period of time is one of the best ways I can achieve this. By fishing with ‘bits’ all the time I never feel you are any closer to your next fish, each session you are almost back to square one whereas with an established bait you have the cumulative effect of it getting better the more goes in, it’s just a consistency thing. I have to admit that I also like the fact that you are giving the carp something positive back in return for angling for them, but hey…that’s just me.
Hookbaits
I’m a big fan of hand rolled, dedicated hookbaits and mine are always quite carefully chosen and constructed. There are a number of reasons for this but the main one is that quite often I find myself in circumstances that require a slightly adapted version other than a bait straight from the bag. This year the biggest consideration has been the bream in the venue, they are ravenous little critters and if you are unlucky enough to drop on a big shoal of them then you’re in trouble. Double 16’s or single 18/20’s were no use and still produced way too many so I rolled up a batch of big 25-30mm baits that consisted of sieved Fusion base mix, egg albumin, Betaine, Belachan and a percentage of cork dust to take a bit of the ‘weight’ out of them. The Egg Albumin was to really harden them up and the Betaine and Belachan were just to add a little bit of extra attraction to them as a hookbait. Once rolled, they were air-dried for a good week or so until they were like bullets and then soaked up in a mix of amino-based liquids. Alongside these big bream proof baits I also used my usual bright yellow pop-ups in conjunction with them as a snowman presentation. Crude it may have been but in the coloured water the combination worked a treat when fished with a 2 bait stringer over a big spread of 18 and 20’s. Whether it was the extra smell, awkward shape, buoyancy or the bit of colour that made them work I’m not sure but they did pick up more bites than the other hookbaits.
The other baits I use are corkballed pop-ups for the times I just want to fish a single hookbait. These are a necessity that relates directly to rig design. They are specifically to fish on a stiff link so it is imperative that they are mega buoyant, the same goes for baits for the short/chod rig, if the baits aren’t buoyant enough then the rig just doesn’t sit right. Again I sieve the base mix out to remove any larger particles and then add a few bits and pieces and hand roll them accordingly. Once air-dried, the resultant baits are rock hard, tightly skinned and will keep a stiff link up for as long as you need them too. That was all I had in my rucksack all year; a pot of corkballed pop-ups, a pot of the cork dusted buoyant bottom baits and a pot of my yellow ones, to be honest often I’d rather not even give myself the option to fettle anything! |
