A brief post on my favourite baits for unfished and neglected lakes, as that is where I fish most of the time. Pressured and busy lakes each require a different approach. Although I enjoy river fishing, the signal crayfish have decimated my river and their huge numbers have been eating all the fish eggs for years. Now starving, the crayfish eat each other. Since some numptie introduced otters in a (private) stretch of the river, virtually nothing lives in there now and I tire of catching crayfish. Back to bait…
Tiger Nuts
Put in a pan, cover with boiling water, leave for 24 hours. Then boil for ninety minutes or so with brown sugar / black treacle and a dash of sea salt. Test one by biting through – it should be cooked through, not still raw in the middle. It can take a long time to cook them up sometimes, but just keep boiling them and they will continue to expand.
Carp, in particular, simply love Tiger Nuts. Nobody knows why they like them quite SO much, but they do. Recently, an angler on the bankside of one of my club lakes (which I rarely frequent) asked me if he could see some tiger nuts, as he had heard of them but never seen one. His face was a picture when I gave him a small handful. He was clearly not impressed. ‘Is that it?’ he asked.
‘That’s it,’ I replied. ‘I know what you’re thinking, they don’t look much, right? Trust me, they work.’
Back in the 1990’s, many a rock hard pit was suddenly bust wide open when the magical secret of tiger nuts finally became widely known. I mean places like Sheepwalk, Ellis, Priory, Wraysbury and a host of other pits up and down the Colne Valle – many are less well known and remain very difficult. Nowadays however, most have seen (a lot of) bait but back then, most had not.
Hemp
I find it best to buy the seeds uncooked. You can soak and then boil them until the kernels split and the white stalks pop out, however there are other things you can do with hemp seeds. If you cook them, chuck in a handful of sea salt.
Try sticking them in a blender raw and grind the seeds down to powder. Then add the juice that you used to cook the tiger nuts and / or hemp seed to the blended seeds and use that as groundbait. It’s lethal.
Luncheon Meat
One of the best baits of all time. Not many fish that swim will refuse a chunk of luncheon meat. Personally, I have caught more carp on luncheon meat than anything else. With so many anglers now using boilies, luncheon meat has just got better and better as the years have rolled on. Never be afraid to rip off a large chunk, the size of a small matchbox is fine. Big bait often does equal big fish.
Luncheon meat also accounted for my PB barbel (10lb 8oz) which came in mid-afternoon on the hottest day of that year.
Halibut Pellets
An amazing bait, particularly if you need to pre-bait for a while. I always buy the big 22mm size. The great thing about halibut pellets is that they attract just about everything – so even if the fish do not find them in short order, the creepy crawlies (snails love them) soon move in and create a natural larder, thus getting the fish feeding on the pre-baited spot sooner or later. I often use them in conjunction with luncheon meat, which I usually prefer on the hook.
Barbel also love halibut pellets and I took a break from carp fishing back in 2012 to go and try my local, crayfish infested river that holds a (very) few, big barbel. I baited up with a 22mm halibut pellet and sat back, having laid a little trail of them downstream (I call it the Hansel and Gretel tactic, it is also how I caught my PB barbel). Six hours later when the rod hooped over, I was not expecting to pull out this dark, 11lb river common carp! He fought like fury on my 8lb line, breaking water twice! I think he thought he was a sailfish!
Years ago, I cracked a particularly hard gravel pit pre-baiting using halibut pellets. The carp in that pit would not have anything until I started to pre-bait with these, in conjunction with luncheon meat of course! I finally caught an 18lb common carp that was jet black all over, mouth, fins, everything. Just a few scales at the belly were tinged with gold and it was clearly very, very old. Sadly, I never got a picture of it which I still regret now. Since then, I have always taken a camera when I go fishing.
Maggots
Another neglected bait nowadays and just as effective as they always have been. They emit ammonia underwater and the fish hone in on the smell from some distance. The sand pit I am currently fishing only started responding when I began to use maggots. Something about the wriggling, smelly little critters can trigger the fish to begin feeding at almost anytime of day.
Bird Seed
Yep, bird seed. Cook it up like any other particle. Virtually everything that swims loves seeds and the variety in a bird seed mix keeps them happily picking around for hours. I usually add some frozen sweetcorn, layers pellets and molasses and cook it up for half an hour. If you do this, stir it now and again or it will stick to the pan base and start to burn, even in the water! And use enough water as the layers pellets act like little sponges and will absorb all that oily, sugary goodness.
Other things…
Sensas groundbait – either the one pictured (black, fishmeal) or the red (original) both work extremely well. The green, betaine groundbait mix is also good, but I forget who makes that.
Weetabix – buy a box of value Weetabix for virtually nothing and use as a binder for ground bait. Fish love Weetabix.
Bread – Obviously a good bait. I use it mainly to pad out groundbait though, as it absorbs flavour and oils so well and it is so cheap!
Boilies – I make my own and I would recommend you do the same if you need/ want to use them. The shop bought (shelf-life) type are often not much cop to be honest.
Boilies were designed for lakes with nuisance fish and where nuts had been banned. They still rarely outscore luncheon meat in my experience, unless the fish have been caught on meat before and/or recently – which is not often nowadays as most anglers do still prefer to use a boiled bait. If you make some, I would recommend you keep the ingredients to a minimum and use fresh ingredients that are a bit different.
My twist is the juice from freshly pressed oranges and my Spicy Chocolate Orange boilies are very simple and work well. I do know a bit about making boilies; amino acids, chemo-reception, trypsin inhibitors and so on; however, the range over which these signals can be detected in reality is very small. You really don’t need to be that subtle unless the carp are very, very cute and this is very rare. It has been said before that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: I would certainly think that expression may apply to the carp scene and the fascination with boilie creation these days.
Apart from my boilies, all these baits are fairly cheap and easy to prepare. Most are not used that much anymore (in comparison to the 1990’s) and are definitely worth trying if you are up against carp that have not seen bait. Good Luck…
Waterside Tales 