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I've not been able to fish for the last 6 weeks and I doubt I'll be going until the kids are off next week. The club have been trapping crayfish with margin nets, they do own other waters but I just don't fancy fishing them, too busy for my liking. Apparently the metoffice have given mild conditions until mid December so I'm hoping it holds out for a couple of months yet before we see any significant freezes. I've been chatting with a couple of coarse anglers I've gotten to know this year. They were surprised at the lack of carpers fishing last winter, especially as they had seen the carp on a regular basis. As you can imagine my ears pricked up at this point and the decision was promptly made to stay for the duration of winter. Anyway, I'm counting down the days until next week, at least I've managed to score some brownie points with getting some bits done on the house and give her a hand with some early Christmas shopping 😉

I use all sorts as hook baits but if you said to me I could only use white pop ups for the rest of my life I could live with it.

For a while I struggled with bait and confidence using it, a while back I switched to sticky krill and it's really playing in my favour with short sessions. I've bought the pure krill liquid too and what I do is put a few boilies in a bag and a splash of liquid, coat the boilies in it and then add some ground up boilie so it sticks to the outside of the boilies. Not sure if adding it to the boilies is making any difference but it's catching me fish on some of the harder waters I fish on so will keep on doing it lol.

I’m not talking about sharing any secrets here, be as vague as you like. But in the last year, I seem to favour wafters for all of my fishing. either oddities like flouro coloured barrels. Or, simple fish based conventional shapes. I don’t know if it’s coincedence but it has helped sort out the fish for me and this year I’ve caught a personal best and one not far off in the same session - so I have reason to have faith. what about you lot?

I use wafters, hardened bottom baits and pop-ups cork ball and normal. White features heavily for me but I also match the hatch and use dull yellow and bright pink on occasion.

I use pop ups in solid bags. Really is smashing the place im currently fishing.

yea totally agree but it is less, you can never be 100% accurate its a compromise between keeping my hook bait as close to a freebie as possible but surprising the hell out of them when they pick it up but if your rigs good and your hooks sharp its to late

I like to keep my bait as close to my free offerings so i never use pop ups. Just a 16mm bottom bait drilled out with a cork insert.

I honestly no longer have a preference, as I now catch (bog all usually😖😳😆) on most baits. For a while I seriously avoided pop-ups, couldn't catch on them to save my life, yet I had caught the first 20 from one lake on a pop-up. The next lake I fished I could not catch on a pop-up at all, every fish came on a bottom bait, either singles or doubles. On Ardleigh almost every fish came on a Snowman bait, the top bait being a bright pop-up with the bottom bait being my food source bait. I think there were a couple caught on pop-ups. A few sessions on Thwaite almost every fish to start with came on pop-ups, Scopex, Pineapple/N-butyric, Green Zing, Monster Crab and Squid and Octopus being the most productive. I then did a winter session, the first few days was pop-ups, where I started playing with my Garlic Spice recipe, then everything switched to my food source. As I went onto Brackens, it was snowman baits, food source topped with either S&O, MC, or my Garlic Spice, no takes came on individual pop-ups, no matter what I tried. I moved onto the South and Central, it has been Snowman set-ups on those three above, or individual Garlic Spice pop-ups, yet other pop-ups have produced nothing. Basically I will experiment until I find what works, I have no preference.

Bait Nutrition I know this has been done to death but I thought I'd start it off from a slightly different angle with a question. Is bait Nutrition the end all and be all of bait? For me No I don't think it is, once more I'd like to point out, nutrition doesn't catch fish. Further more I'll make a distinctive point, lower nutrition doesn't equate to a harmful bait. The two subjects couldn't be any further apart. A generalisation I know but, personally I'm bored of seeing nutrition this and nutrition that, it's a new buzz word that has replaced the older words of Amino Acid. We're frequently told that we shouldn't listen to hype, well I think this is hype, it's what everyone wants to hear, playing on the guilt of anglers. Yeah sure we all have a responsibility to the care of the fish we catch but come on people look at it from outside the box. Carp aren't only eating your boilies, there's an abundance of food items present in every single venue around the country, man made and natural. A bait doesn't have to be a nutritionally packed item to catch fish. Once more I have proof. Let's look at some of the best anglers around. Darrell Peck, admitted he knows very little about bait yet catches. Simon Crow was with Nash, he caught fish, he's now with DNA, still catches fish Ian Macmillan was with dynamite, he caught fish, he's now with DNA, he catches fish. Gaz Fareham was with ccmoore, he caught fish, he's now with sticky, he still catches fish. Adam Penning was with mainline, he caught fish, he's now with sticky, guess what, he still catches fish. Look at our very own nige, (sorry nige but your the best example I can think of) used essential baits he caught fish, now uses Nash, guess what, he still catches fish. Terry Hearn, has the bait world at his knees, and still he catches on tigers. I bet non of the baits above are nutritionally perfect, they catch fish, and again they don't cause any harm. Jim Gibbinson once wrote Some anglers who subscribe to the HNV theory catch fish. Some anglers who subscribe to the HNV theory don't catch fish. Some anglers who don't subscribe to the HNV theory catch fish. Some anglers who don't subscribe to the HNV theory don't catch fish. Never a truer word It's all about the angler