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Well I'm getting a few hours on the lake tonight, whether it's too hot to fish or not! I doubt I'll caught any, but if i do it's unhook in the net, quick pic and back in the water. Tight lines guys

I'm thinking about a Canal Carp, around September baiting a few spots along a stretch not for from me...

IMO YES this is the time. If I could go today I would but no fishing this weekend. I am starting the prebaiting on Sunday though 😎👍

Well today I started to construct some 40mm-ish hookbaits . Mike Wilmott from Essential bait had advised me to try making some from their paste so thought I’d give it a try today. I got some of their B5 shellfish paste along with some Black snail , 3 x 100g balls of each to start with as it’s just an experiment. As to be expected I turned to our Nick for any advice he could offer as although I had made my own boilies a few years ago , tweaking an Odyssey xxx base mix , I don’t have any means to roll anything bigger than 20mm. He told me that a few mm of paste wrapped around a 20mm cork ball should achieve a zero or neutral buoyancy Boilie boiled for a couple of minutes . Anyway I could only source 19mm balls . the texture of the pastes upon defrosting were quite different , the Snail staying together and rolled out with a mini rolling pin made 4 approx 40mm baits …they only needed to be approximate I’m no perfectionist even when it comes to fishing . The B5 on the other hand had a completely different texture and kept flaking and falling into little parts . Years ago I might have added some oil to keep it together but Mr Wilmott has obviously seen this before , after all it’s his paste , and having told me this might happen advised dipping my hands in lukewarm water which did the trick and I was able to roll the paste between the palms of my hands . I needed more paste for this though in order to keep it together , I only managed to get 3 baits out of 100g of paste . now as I say , I’m no perfectionist , it was difficult to tell the thickness of paste around the finished baits or even if the cork balls were central within the paste but I don’t really care tbh , at least not until I see how they react in a glass of water once they’ve dried out properly in a couple of days . If they waft that’s fine if they don’t that’s fine too . Im pretty sure they won’t pop up properly as I’ve used too much paste . Over the weekend I’ll experiment some more and make some solid boilies (the plan being merely to stop 5lbers getting them in their mouths and buzzing off with em 🤣. I have some wooden balls in various sizes I’d like to utilise but the problem there is they are pre-drilled balls which will make it difficult to keep attached to the rig so if anybody has any ideas on how to get around this then I’m all ears (or eyes of course). Plan is to dry em out for a day or 2 and add some liquid food or glug every now & again in preparation for my session weekend of 29th July . Here is a couple of pics , firstly of todays end product and also the Combi rig I intend to stick em on next weekend .

I think now as the temps are dropping, after the hot spell, should the fish be on the munch in a few days ?...

I'm not going to get into the barbed vs barbless debate, but on the barbless waters I have fished, the mouths are more damaged😉