Leaderboard

Correct😁 Dunno.... I could have done with some help on Saturday 🤣

That’s exactly where I am when it comes to bait, i much prefer a food source bait over a bait that’s all food signal/smell but little substance. I could have used the same attractor profiles, flavours, oils and powdered attractors and bunged them into a 50/50 semolina/soya base, I would get bites on it short term, but I like having something nutritional that they will come back to, in the thought it is doing some good. of course it’s all guess work really, my fish meal baits have shellfish sense appeals and monster crab as a flavour, when I smell them, they smell like, well shellfish and crab! But that isn’t how the carp smell them do they? They don’t smell like we do as such, they recognise them at a different level, maybe the chemical base of the flavour. So theres me thinking well it’s 2ml of shellfish SA and 0.5ml of MC, but as the flavours are from the same company, which probably use the same base for these flavours, the carp are just detecting 2.5ml of the base chemical? After all, when we smell ethyl acetate, we smell pear drops, but the carp just detects ethyl acetate? So use 2 different fruit flavours with the same ethyl acetate base and to the carp it’s all the same? In colder waters, I want a flavour that’s more soluble, so it can escape the bait, I also wanted a coarser base to help with leakage, hence the bird food. Yet I added fruit factor 6 as a powdered attractor, which won’t have the same solubility, but can help in “repelling” silt ingress to the baits - my waters are pretty silty, but again, is this important? on one of my waters, I was told that I won’t catch unless I use pop ups to keep the bait out of the silt. All my carp in the last 2 seasons have been on bottom baits in the silt… when I fish pop ups, they tend to be low lying pop ups over the gravelly edges in the margins, fished in complete isolation. I know that the carp are in these margins regularly, so a single pop up in the right place will produce the goods. there is a belief that silt tainted baits will not be as acceptable to carp, but I disagree, they are used to feeding in silt, their senses through their barbules are extremely sensitive, if they detect a boilie in the silt they will still recognise the food signals it’s kicking out. One lad couldn’t believe that I had 4 runs in one night fishing bottom baits in the silt, when we talked about it, he said that when he fished bottom baits in the middle he caught nothing. But that’s not the bait, but down to the type of silt, where the hook bait was placed. some silt is horrible sour crud that the carp doesn’t like to feed over, but some silt is much finer, with a more neutral “taste” (?) without that sour smell that the carp will happily feed over, it’s where bloodworm and other goodies are naturally found so the bait presentation wasn’t the issue, the location of that bait was. if I offered you a nice meal on a clean plate, you’d eat it, if I offered the same meal on a plate that was smeared with human excrement, you wouldn’t go anywhere near it. That’s how I see it anyway. I still like to sniff my marker leads, as well as drill and score them to collect silt so I can see what it’s like