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A couple from France, double take madness 🇫🇷

Just back from my return visit to Brothers Lake, France. Weather at the start was hot and the fishing was slow, but as the week progressed and temps cooled off the fishing got better and better and I finished off with 15 fish to 49lb inc 7 x 30s and another mid 40. Tactics were scatterings of boilie only - put out with the stick to a marker float every afternoon and a small top-up at dusk. The fish were feeding heavily on naturals, fizzing up most of the day everyday, just past where we were fishing or anywhere without lines between us in the middle. Being a small lake they did exactly this last trip despite us being on the opposite bank this time. I chose to go with my newish wafter rig, a slip-d, multi - tied using the Korda hook-clip, size 6 wide gapes, Esp Tungsten Loaded and Gardner XL tungsten aligners, Korda tungsten large anti tangle sleeve - with a total rig length of around 5 inches. With a golf ball sized funnel-web bag of mixed pellet, boilie crumb and 10ml Odyssey XXX. Feeding 15ml XXX and using 15ml wafters as hookbaits. By the end of the week I just wanted a 50 to complete what had been a great session and at 1am on the final night I got my wish, well not quite but 49 will more than do. Some of the fish:

Hi all I'm riks and I'm 40 years old and have been fishing on and off since I was a teen. I love my carp and course fishing , love feeder fishing ! I joined up a couple weeks ago as I was looking for information regarding my old school fox DXR alarms and wether fox mk2 illuminated swingers would work with them. Well the help I got was awesome. I took a chance on purchasing the swingers without knowing if they would work and members of the site advised that they should/would and safe to say saved me from an expensive dose of anxiety 😂 . I'm originally from walton on Thames so I've always been a river thames fisherman but now I live in greater Manchester I am mainly stuck to lakes . And also looking for fishing buddies as I don't really know anyone up here I'm sad to say. Unfortunately I can only get out every other weekend so not as often as I would like with family and work etc. just want to say thanks to those who helped me with my post and tight lines to you all 🎣

I tried sea fishing at snettisham Bay Norfolk this year and yeah il stick to my course fishing 🤣 was not a fan of those lug worms and threading them over the hooks. Was there all day as the tide came in and not a sausage . Probably doing it wrong but I've had a go ha ha

Watching the sun drop behind the trees anticipating the coming witching hour 👌

Lymm dam

Ratticus pesticus sniffing me out at queens mere dam in swinton couple years back. Place is full of them as well as the drunk and drug abusing types 🫪🙄

Hi peeps , anyone on here fish or are familiar with lymm dam ? It's a large still water near Warrington greater Manchester. I've fished it a few times and I'm a member of Bay Malton angling club which runs the syndicate . Cheers Riks

That is the problem of buying in bulk. I used to work in the chemical industry for most of my working life and we used to use 25kg plastic tubs of Potassium Permanganate in one process which were very sturdy and seals well. Needless to say, every time I used one it was washed out and brought home - I was doing my bit for the environment! I'm also fortunate that I have quite a large garage and they are labelled and stacked up around the edge and I can still get the car in. Interesting to get an insight from someone who has seen what goes on from the other side of the fence. Unfortunately my local shop didn't want to meet me half way as they prefer to sell the £5+ 1kg bags of pellets.

A few interesting points in here. Having worked in a couple of tackle shops and animal feed stores I know how much bait costs both ways. In terms of base mixes and boilies, the tackle shops buy from the manufacturer, at cost. It's basically divide buying price by 2, then multiply by 3 and add VAT, so £6.99 tackle shop buying price worked out at £11.99 when I was there. That's not that big a profit when you consider storage, freezer, carriage, wages and handling. It is very difficult to compete when anglers are able to buy direct from the manufacturer at cost! I used to field test, proper field testing rather than buying at discount, and I bought non test bait at discount, but got test baits for free, if that makes sense. The test baits I gave feedback on, and gave ideas for baits I came up with. There were a couple of my own flavour blends and pop-ups added to the bait makers range, which I never had to pay for. Come to that I know that a fish in I provided a lot of bait for for anglers going which was given to me by the bait company. I couldn't afford to pile bait in as a field tester, yet I saw some with magazine media presence really go for it. A bulk bag of pellets from a wholesaler is around £60, around £3 per kilo, so if a tackle shop sells them you are looking at around £5 a kilo, which is why so many sell 1kg bags. I'm not sure on the price of buckets, I think I paid £10 for a bucket last year (my sea fishing bucket) from a shop, yet years ago I used to get 10kg buckets of base mix for around £72.99, the bucket was free. @Golden Paws I don't like having loads of bait about, but I do have an advantage, Gladwells at Copdock Mill is 5minutes away, and I can buy ready prepped hemp, and 3kg buckets of pellets, or bulk sacks. Gladwells incidentally own Crafty Catcher so I can get bulk bags of Skrettings pellets or Crafty Catcher pellet buckets. I know Gladwells sell their boilie and bait range at the same price as tackleshops. I do buy 1 or 2 kilo bags of birdfood from the supermarket and prepare at home.

I buy 20kg sacks of pigeon conditioner from pets at home for around £20 and as it swells to 2 or 3 times it dry size, it's as cheap as chips. It was a little "bitty" and so I've also bought 25kg of maple peas from bait superstore for £30 to bulk it out a bit. I'm getting through a pressure cooker's worth on an average day session, topped up with some pellets which I also buy in 20kg sacks as it keeps the price down rather than buying a 1kg bag for over a fiver. It really annoys me when you see sponsored anglers chucking in 10kg or more of boilies which would equate to about £120, if they had to pay for it of course. When I looked at buying some boilies a good few years ago, the brand I was using showed all it's sponsored anglers on their website - and there were plenty of them! It's bad enough buying it for yourself, when you know that you are subsidising other peoples angling, it does grate a bit. I changed to Baitworks as I liked the look of their products and as they sell direct to the public, they cut out the middle man (tackle shops I'm afraid), who want their 50% of the selling price. My local tackle shop used to sell pellets in 3kg buckets which made them a bit cheaper. They stopped doing it as they said the flimsy buckets they were using were too expensive. I offered to bring back my old buckets to be topped up but they didn't seem interested. I also enquired about buying a sack of pellets from them but that also wasn't met with much enthusiasm. I then had no qualms about going on-line and then buying in bulk.

Maples are the particle I would go back to if I had the time to have a turnover…or the need for mass particle baiting. @OldBoy not at all. I love a good particle chat. I don’t tend to use them much anymore as I do very short session and mainly fish over boilie only or pellet for ease. I don’t get time to pre-bait nowadays!

That would pee me off! I take Sky, we walk round the lake, and her mess is picked up, my cigarette butts get binned. I even now take the trouble to sort out my rubbish for recycling, easier with soft plastic now going in my blue bin.

I agree that the quality of hemp has gone downhill and silly prices. If I do buy it I now buy ready prepared by Copdock Mill/Crafty Catcher (the two are one company), rather than prepare my own like I used to. The amount of hemp I used to go through, whole sacks in a month! Carp fishing, roach fishing, and boy could carp trough on it. Kidney beans are brilliant. Again I don't prepare my own anymore, I buy tinned from the shop, prepared in chilli sauce. A great hookbait.

Just got back from a 2 day trip. Apparently a bait company hired the place for a few days and my swim was littered with beer bottle tops, Fag butts and other assorted rubbish. The crisp packet and brunch bar were mine to go into the old quality street tub I use as my rubbish bin.

Not at all. It's a decent topic.

Tigers and hemp - never buy hemp anymore - poor quality imo and price gone through the roof too. I sometimes use an alternative that looks like it tho, Not tried Kidney beans but have made a mental note 👍 Chickpeas I use in my spod / spomb mix, and mix natural and coloured ones together. Might even sneak them on a hair rig too! 🤫 Blackeyes are very underated and many many years ago I used them float fishing at a Kernow venue with great success. @greekskii and @yonny I accept you might find my posts on here a bit 'provocative' but as said before I have really seen and heard it all before, just for info I should be off to a lake tomorrow, method feeder and particle hook baits, will I catch, I hope so, at my age just love getting out on the bank now. Tight Lines all

Tigers, maize, maple peas and hemp are the only particles that I don't think are improved by adding flavours to them, however dark brown sugar improves them. Chilli hemp seems to work no better than standard hemp in my experience, but other may find different. I flavour almost every other particle, birdfood, chickpeas, kidney beans, black eyes, and colour some of them. Kidney beans seem to be improved in chilli sauce (even better is that you can get chillied kidney beans in tins). Chickpeas and blackeyes, both take on colour and flavour during the soak, and turmeric and paprika are brilliant spices to add in the soak, as is crushed ginger. The ground turmeric and paprika add colour, while ginger is a 'flavour'. I've tried artificial or carp shelf flavours, and some work, others not so. I have a feeling that artificial flavours are not as good as Nature Identical or flavours made using essential oils or natural products.

I think tigers are a great examples mate. A little sugar transforms them. Agree on the salt (particularly rock salt), garlic and chilli too. Fantastic additives. I'd also mention fenugreek, yeast extract (marmite), condensed milk, fish sauce, fizzy drinks (coke/red bull) etc..... there's loads of them (most of which are heavy on either salt or sugar) that can really put a twist on your particles. Do they work?.... who knows. They defo don't do any harm as I've caught plenty of carp on all of them.

I’ve just made some tigers. I add heaps of dark brown sugar at the soaking stage. Boil it in the same solution. Really kick starts the “gooing” stage. Two nights in a relatively cool garage and there is a heavy goo already. poor example as tigers don’t take much on but I tried one and they are super sweet compared to a standard one cooked without sugar. I don’t add anything to particle apart from sugar, salt or garlic. Occasionally chilli. No artificial stuff, think it defeats the point. as Yonny said you dont boil out salt or sugar. When you cook pasta you add salt to the boiling water before adding to pasta, to enhance its flavour. You then boil it and you get the taste. The salt remains. Sugar in the same.

Hitting boiling point does not mean boiling out. You can boil all the water away. The salt/sugar will remain.