salokcinnodrog
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Posts posted by salokcinnodrog
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9 hours ago, OldBoy said:
Just a thought, I use inline leads when bag fishing, no leaders or lead core.
Probably best to make sure if you have a crack off / cut off, that the line can pass through your lead set up?
I used to do the inline lead and everything in the bag years ago when I really wanted a nice tidy setup on Nazeing for long distance casting. A rubber tulip bead inside the lead and I think it was Fox tubing only just longer than the lead. I believe it was @nigewoodcock who suggested lighter blobbing the end of the tubing inside the tulip bead to hold it without glue. I lighter blobbed it while it was on a standard sewing needle or thin baiting needle, and then slid the tulip bead down to it.
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1 hour ago, commonly said:
We all need to chip in for better anti virus software😄
If I win , I'll gladly pay for ir
Sadly that is the reason why I often have to put post moderation and human verification on new members. It's when new members who immediately start spamming after joining that we get caught out.
- elmoputney and commonly
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On 16/10/2025 at 18:18, commonly said:
So, I joined a little syndicate recently.
Well stocked to a few early 40's,
Initially thought there's a few odd rules, but whatever.
As times gone by (4 x 48's), I've had a low 30 on the first visit) I've sort of lost interest in the place.
A few mates are on the ticket, but we haven't been free at the same time for a social.
After fishing a reservoir and that feeling of having something no ones caught before, I've just not had the same buzz with this place.
The search for a decent venue continues i guess??
Like @yonny I never fish as well on a social as I do on my own. However like you I have lost interest in carp fishing at the moment, despite having a good syndicate, for a couple of reasons, most of which revolves around my dad.
I'm also slightly bugged by issues that happened around members who only fished when their other syndicate was closed.
I tend to catch when I can do 3 or 4 days, and either setup on fish, or prime an area for them to move onto.
However I do know I love the lake and when things work out I will be back on there aiming to catch both Chestnut and the BC along with any other fish that just happen to come my way.
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8 minutes ago, Carpbell3 said:
there was a company doing snail boilies It looks like they have stopped doing them, could be worth a phone call to double check
https://www.carpparticles.co.uk/product-category/boilies-hookbaits/
I know Rod Hutchinson do Water Snail Naturalz:
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You have loads of water in the Lea Valley. Look up Lea Valley fisheries https://leevalleyfisheries.co.uk/ they have loads of waters. While some are on a waiting list others are still open for tickets.
I was fishing Nazeing Meads from 2008-2019 and if travel wasn't such a problem for me from Suffolk I would probably still be there.
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8 hours ago, jh92 said:
That's some dedication mate, I didn't mind picking the water snails but there's no way I'm touching garden snails or slugs, can't you get ring worm or some other parasite from them? 🤣
Not from land snails unless you eat them, more likely to get parasites from water snails, and I do keep sanitiser handy after picking them out.
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On 04/10/2025 at 12:49, jh92 said:
There's a lot of snails on the canal at the moment and the fish seem to be hoovering them up and avoiding bait lol. Any suggestions on how I can catch a couple of them for bait, like some sort of snail trap?
I go through stages of trying things out, and some of my favourite stalking baits in rivers are slugs and snails, because they occasionally fall in from bankside vegetation. Chub and carp have taken slugs on the drop, although snails are harder to hook...
I did try putting land and water snails in my spod mix a few times, and a mate and I have been known to walk round the lake collecting them. We get water snails as big as your thumb! The best way to use them we found to stop them floating was freeze them. It never seemed to produce any more than standard spod mix.
I've used Dynamite hemp and snails and it seems no better than plain hemp, although I do know that when fish get onto snails they are very good for growth and health.
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17 hours ago, Golden Paws said:
1. For the ultimate in being a tart, take a bivvy, brolly and gazebo. Don’t laugh, I saw it last weekend on a commercial where you can park your car behind the swim.
2. Have a splash mat under your reels, the ultimate in tartyness.
3. Carry 20 different types of pop-up but only use 1.
4. Take a 2 man bivvy but you only do over-nighters.
5. Take a powered fridge despite the fact you only keep your sandwiches and lager in it.
6. Own a 5-season sleeping bag despite the fact you hang your rods up in October.
7. Have a power bank that could keep a family home going for a couple of days in a power cut but you only charge your phone and torch.
8. Your rod-pod has so much stainless that you have to wear sunglasses to look at it.
9. You have a power barrow with so much grunt it could stop an average scrum but you only fish a 2 acre lake with manicured lawns.
10. Your phone is permanently on FaceBook so you can keep in contact with both of your friends.
11. A pair of 10x25 binoculars is more than ample and fits in your pocket when folded down. So why do you take a set of field glasses that can spot a mouse a mile away?
12. You wear bivvy slippers to keep your groundsheet clean.
13. A head torch is a necessity after dark but you need to keep it down to keep your night-sight when you turn it off. Your 8000 Lumen monstrosity resembles the Blackpool illuminations.
14. You bring your camper van to a commercial that allows rear of swim parking and stay in it all day and night watching TV or reading a book and only come outside once a day. Don’t laugh, I have seen it.
15. You own 2 sets of rods/reels/buzzers because you fish different waters and don’t want to handicap yourself.
16. Despite having a double burner and family sized returnable gas bottle and associated cookware, your meals are delivered to your swim from the local greasy spoon and pizza shop.
17. You have a bait boat with GPS and Sonar despite your lake being as pancake flat as the day the bulldozer created it. It also has a 4kg payload despite the fact you only use PVA bags.
18. Everyone loves a bivvy table. A small one just big enough for your tackle box, scales, phone and receiver is ample. A true tackle tart pushes it to the max and I saw 2 blokes in adjoining swims with a decorating table that you use for hanging wallpaper.
19. You have a top of the range DSLR with an impressive pixel count but the deal clincher was the 40 frames per second burst shooting rate it offered. Despite the fact you will never use it. You only shoot in Auto and use the photo’s unaltered on your FaceBook page.
20. You take 3 nets with you, “just in case.” The water you are fishing is rock hard and 2 fish a season is considered good going.
Most definitely I am guilty of number 3 and number 8.
I took out loads of pop-ups and the ones left appear to have reproduced in a Heinz 57 babies...
As for the rod pod, I must admit to owning a Solar P1 but it has been abused a bit
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1 hour ago, Serenity said:
Things like glycerine,salt and sugar I would only use at the appropriate time of year, when the carp are expecting to find them and will be stimulated by them.
I'm wary of sugar and salt, but even though glycerine comes from fats being processed, and supposedly needs emulsifying in winter, I found glycerine/glycerol flavours still produced in winter, even compared to the same flavours on ethyl alcohol as the solvent.
It has made me convinced that glycerine is an attractor in its own right. I'm not sure if any of the bait or flavour specialists have written about it. I'm going to have to try to find out.
- kevtaylor and elmoputney
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14 hours ago, jules007 said:
Having been back at carp angling for a year after the massive long break, i did not figure to go back to doing any overnight sessions at all, years ago i sold of my bivvy and bed chair, i also promised my good lady i would not do nights, so as a compromise i have found a lake i can do 24 hour sessions on and my mrs can stop at a good friends house close by in catterick 5 mins from green lane fishery.
Seeing as this night fishing is gonna be limited to less than 5 24 hour trips in a year i have decided to do a bad thing and get a pop up green tent, single air bed and generic 4 season sleeping bag, all this gear is a nice way to avoid carp tax with the whole lot costing less than a bedchair and taking up a tiny bit of room, i have brew making and cooking gear in our main camping kit, sadly this will have to wait till next year before i can go, but moving in right direction
Fish to your own limits and conditions.
I think that we have conditioned ourselves for fishing to be plotting up at the lake Friday night, popping the bivvy up, making ourselves super comfortable, then catching or not and packing up Sunday. That's 'carp fishing'.
I went through a stage on a particular park lake where I didn't want locals knowing
(a) I was there.
(b) I was catching.
I would sleep on a camping air mattress roll, with a tarpaulin cover after arriving as darkness fell. I could get the rods out more quickly, and in unfished areas.
I've posted this pic before, but I could get up close with minimal disturbance and be off very quickly in the morning.
- Roughtor, jh92, Golden Paws and 3 others
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1 hour ago, elmoputney said:
Guys I read about how glycerine is used to preserve some baits, I am looking into making my own boilie chops and was thinking I could make a cheeky glycerine liquid using the same flavours and liquids that will be going into my baits. If I was to use a 50/50 mix of glycerine and the extract I am planning to use and some flavour to give it the same label as the bait and boost it post boiling. Is this a good idea and will it work still as a preservative (just a bit not enough to smother it just a coating) will it also slightly harden the baits?
Also I would like to make a hookbait spray to match but not sure where to start with this if anyone has any pointers would be appreciated
Thanks.
Elmo
A glycerine and sugar syrup is now frequently used to make 'identical' freezer and shelf life boilies. The base mix is the same, but instead of freezing after drying, the baits are given a run around in the bath and then dried again.
Freezer baits tend to have an attraction 2 or 3 days after thawing as the enzymes, salts and sugars migrate to the surface due to moisture, where I personally think shelf life's have the added instant attraction due to the glycerine. They may both be food baits, the same recipe but the glycerine make them more instant. The two can be used together, or separately.
Shelf life boilies I have found to be harder, and the longer you leave them, the harder they get to the point of drilling.
You can air dry, without freezing the standard bait to rock hard, it will need drilling to go on the hair, but they take on water more quickly and almost explode.
Back in the early 2000's I played around with bait soaks and glugs, with ideas from the original Nutrabaits Bait soaks which were Nutramino and Multimino PPC and added my flavour and essential oil combination; the Peach Nutrafruit was on glycerine/glycerol. The hookbaits after a couple of weeks were rock hard and able to withstand the attentions of small silvers and chub in the lakes and rivers.
I have played with other glugs, often based around Liquid Yeast Extract
I did play with matching of flavour sprays, but they did need watering down to put in an atomiser bottle.
One thing I did find was neat flavours could be a repellant or create a feeding area or attention area actually away from the hookbait. I can't remember which Tim Paisley book it is in, probably Carp, but both him and Rod Hutchinson came to the conclusion that the flavour was acceptable a distance away from the bait, and it is there that the carp boiled, rolled or attempted to feed.
So use flavours at low level, or avoid them altogether and stick with natural attraction.
- elmoputney and kevtaylor
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On 27/09/2025 at 18:51, elmoputney said:
I can remember most of the captures just about, not sure about all the rigs and hookbaits now though,maybe a p42 pop up for some though, too much life in between and I've always been bad at keeping notes.
I'm Autistic and can remember back years. It's not always a positive!
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On 26/09/2025 at 09:46, elmoputney said:
I only went back 3 years because that's how long I've been pretty much exclusively using pop ups and my version of the spinner rig with the avid kicker. I just penned those figures to highlight that really 😉
I'm sad enough to be able to remember the majority of my captures from over 25years ago, albeit some do take a picture reminder.
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On 24/09/2025 at 12:50, elmoputney said:
My average fish size has also increased Infact looking back my average is way over 20lb in the last 3 years. And a lot less tench too which is always nice.
I'm positive that my average is well over 20lb over the past 18years on the big fish waters. On Nazeing from 2008-2018 I can recall only 4 fish below 20lb; 3 high doubles from Brackens and a 10lb mirror from Central Lagoon.
On Alton I did have a couple of doubles, both on snowman baits, a couple of 20's on pop-ups, one on a snowman and the rest of the 20's came on double 18mm bottom baits.
On 24/09/2025 at 18:16, emmcee said:A mate on dinton once asked me "how come you catch a lot of bigguns?". I put it down to the spots I was fishing if I'm honest and a large slice of luck but this thread has maybe changed my mind on that as I virtually always fished pop ups, he was a snowman or bottom bait angler.
I was catching a lot of fish from the syndicate until August and the personal problems.
The syndicate has seen 20's and 30's caught on trimmed down 12mm pop-ups, 15mm pop-ups,, snowman baits and 15mm bottom baits, over just boilies and over particles, with only 3 doubles I think.
8 hours ago, crusian said:Hello Everyone .
While we are on the subject of High Pop Ups where are you measuring from please ? .
Some seem to measure from the hook eye to the balancing weight , whereas others take the measurement from the weight to the bottom of the pop up .
Ta .
🤔
To me the base of the pop-up to the lakebed. Be aware though, that not every pop-up rig sits perfectly upright. The rig shown, I may need to trim down the pop-up, and with that balance weight, you need a buoyant bait to lift it to that angle.
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4 hours ago, elmoputney said:
I'm not saying you won't catch on bottom baits. I just feel pop ups are more selective and smaller fish tend to ignore them.
To be honest Mate, I don't think so. I've probably caught far more smaller carp on pop-ups than bigger fish, although obviously big fish are fewer in number than smaller ones.
2x 18mm bottom baits is probably more big fish orientated than a 15mm pop-up, and catching 3 big fish over 25lb out of Alton in a night while the pop-up was ignored. Then catching 2 small 20's on the pop-up on another occasion. It's a case of finding the right method for the fish at the time.
Of all the 30's I have had, snowman with an 18mm bottom and 15mm has produced a few, a 15mm pop-up has produced one and the double 18mm bottom bait a few more, and even a single 15mm bottom bait a couple.
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2 hours ago, jules007 said:
the pop up was very blatent, when i fish pop up i tend to put the shot a couple of mm behind the hook eye keeping it as low as possible..........................still dont catch though
2 hours ago, elmoputney said:Pop ups are a big fish rig. Pretty much all I use these days because I want to hook the big ones 😎
I do try my pop-ups at various heights, says he who used to prefer keeping them as low as possible. I’ve caught fish on pop-ups close to the lakebed, the counterbalance being on the hook eye, to around 10centimetres above the lakebed, which to me seemed like a zig rig.
I'm not sure that pop-ups are a big fish only setup, although I suppose that is relative. 23lb is a big fish, but when the lake has fish to 50, 23lb is 'small'. Going back through my captures, I've caught big fish on bottom and snowman baits as well, including 30lb carp.
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I watch the videos and I always chuckle to myself. The swim being fished has so many things that can add to the already wary fishes 'stress'.
Obviously first one is the camera, and any attachment to the bank, wires or cables, as it is unlikely underwater cameras will be wire free.
Then we have feeding situation. The water may or may not be a boilie water, or a water where particles or groundbait are the best feeding stimulant.
As for my fishing I tend not to be pedantic about camouflage, but I do try to minimise it being over conspicuous.
There are times that I have seen fish spook off bright fluorescent baits, yet at other times they are the best way to catch.
My hooklinks I prefer green or green, black and dirty white (Merlin). I think that matches the majority of lake bottoms. My mainline is usually clear in clear waters, and is as much as possible fished slack line and running leads, or rods low so the line is along the lakebed if possible, although I believe that at anything over 40metres, the line is along the lakebed anyway.
I stopped using leaders unless I have to, and I still catch on straight through mainline, and with no anti-tangle tubing.
Like @elmoputney I don't think that the fish can identify a hook, run ring, bead, lead or swivel, and that green hooklink looks like a strand of weed.
Baitwise, I prefer an unobtrusive bait, for a couple of reasons, to try to stop swan life, but also to match my freebies which are normally brown. However, as said, there are times in late autumn, winter and early spring when I think that a fluorescent bait is better or will provoke takes.
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21 hours ago, crusian said:
Thanks for the car info. , Nick . I currently have a 2003 Honda Civic , but I could do with some extra height as the cars with Zenon lights dazzle me . I used to have a 2003 Honda CRV , so maybe I'll go for a newer version ? .
I'm thinking that the fact your Dad wants to engage with people , and day time tv is annoying him is a positive as it sounds like he wants to be stimulated ? .
All the best .
😃
My brother has a newer model CRV, and I have been in it on a decent journey when we came back from Tottenham Stadium when the Chicago Bears beat Jacksonville. It's nice, comfortable and on my list of 'possibles', as is the Nissan X-Trail.
I've got a collection of books for my Dad, the type of things that interest him, the cracking of Enigma, Orford Island and it's uses in military research, The Channel Island and German Occupation and the development of the Spitfire amongst others.
His problem with socialising is he gets an interest in something and doesn't understand that it is not always relevant, or that in the case of the charity work he used to do for Greenways that during school holidays children would be included so he needed a DBS.
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12 hours ago, crusian said:
At last a breathing space for you and your Brother ; your Dad's in safe hands , and much easier to visit regularly .
Shame about your car , at least it lasted while you were commuting to Aldburgh .
Skoda Yeti , ooh I've been looking to buy one of those , but my Wife is not so keen 😢 .
Well tight lines , Nick , and best wishes to your Dad .
😃
Honda and VW are my two preferred manufacturers, and while Skoda is owned by VW, it just doesn't feel as comfortable and is slightly short of power. I've also found it slightly more difficult to balance the clutch and accelerator on starts. There is room for the gear, but not loads more as you would think. I'd happily go back to the new model Golf, although I am not sure on the liftback of the newer Civics.
I did see my dad today, he was dressed but in his room as I think he finds daytime television and the lack of conversation in the lounge annoying. He doesn't understand that it's a rehab unit, and they've got various stages of dementia.
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On 07/09/2025 at 22:13, crusian said:
Well that's sounds encouraging , Nick .
When your Dad is back at Aldeburgh hopefully you can draw breath , and relax a little after your difficult few weeks .
With these big winds , and rain of late they should be biting down your syndicate .
😃
Hopefully now things should settle down, my dad has been transferred to a rehabilitation unit in a care home quite local to me. He is still confused and unable to make decisions for himself with his dementia so my brother and I have signed the contract for the free treatment for 2-6weeks. It does mean that Dom and I can do alternative day visits to him, which might mean I can actually get fishing in again on the syndicate.
On a negative note I had to scrap my Honda Civic after a failed MOT, but have a hire car even if it is a Skoda Yeti.
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On 15/09/2025 at 10:54, OldBoy said:
Just an update on original post, after playing around with the stuff it tended to make method mix very sticky and not as firm as I wanted (oh err).
Anyway, probably should have thought of this before, just blitzed up some flaked maize to add to existing mix and it seems to do the job nicely.
Off to an 'easy' Kernow water next week to give it a go.
Flaked maize itself is sticky when wet and works well in Method Mix, no major need to blitz it up.
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yesterday's driving music
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I got into discussions with someone about bait companies this year and I gave some figures for various bait companies. Dynamite baits (owned by Rapala), have less than 10 employees, and have a turnover of less than £1million.
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2 hours ago, ouchthathurt said:
To be honest, if I want a different hookbait, I just make the pillows the way nick described, put the sausage on the rolling table and cut it like that. Also using a (I think, im sure someone will point me right) using say, a 10mm sausage on a 12mm rolling table will make more dumbbell shaped baits? Im sure I’ve seen/heard that somewhere. Never tried it though
I'm sure that I have done that for dumbell shapes, or a too large a sausage, say 14mm for ovaloids.
In fact on a 'compatible' nozzle and rolling table, say 12mm, if the gun compresses the base mix, as they are extruded they will expand slightly and be slightly off shape as well.
1 hour ago, framey said:I must have miss read it easy mistake to make lol but it’s all cool however you want to do it.
Another alternative is you could always just air dry them without boiling at all to get a harder skin on them and once that has dissolved you would have a paste so even quicker as no boiling involved
it would keep the Rudd away for a little
I used to air dry unboiled base mix balls totally, mixed with water and the other liquids, to get a fast breakdown, basically like the ball pellets that were available at the time.
The Effect Of Rain On Fishing
in UK Carp Fishing
Posted
I used to love fishing after a good rain in south or westerly winds.
I think it was my first season on the 2acre Brackens, and after serious rain it would fish it's nuts off.