Playing with bait

[ouchthathurt]

Afternoon all, 

so my fishing has taken a back seat for the moment with the birth of my youngest son 2wks ago, so to stave off the carpy withdrawal symptoms, I have started to play about with a few things to keep me busy… 

for a while, I’ve been thinking about bait, specifically something for the winter when realistically, I’ll be able to get my rods out again (my choice, a new baby is hard work!) 

my usual bait, consisting of premier supermarinos basemix, with cream palatant, belachan flavour at 2ml per six eggs, shellfish sense appeals at 2ml, a dribble (0.5ml) of monster crab flavour, 20ml of salmon oil, added haiths robin red, and a dash of blood powder to help harden the baits (the resulting baits are a tad soft for hookbaits without the addition of blood powder or egg albumin to harden them up - I don’t want to boil the granny out of them!) has for years been all I’ve ever wanted from a bait, it catches carp wherever I take it, so what more do I need?? 
 

well in the depths of winter, I felt that the bait might not be for the best, so I wanted something different… but what? 
 

now “back in the day” my go to winter bait was good old Richworth banana ester readymades, an awesome banana aroma, bright yellow in colour and something a little different to the usual pineapple baits most were using. Going to the big one show in Feb sparked the memory of banana baits when I brought a limited edition pot of banana pop ups that took me back to my youth! 
 

so why not just buy a bag of banana readymades and be done with it? Because I freely admit to being a bit of a bait snob, and would rather roll my own baits than buy a bag… (yet I have a bag of krill bottom baits for quick sessions and theres no bait in the freezer! I am a contradiction in terms!) 

i wanted a bait that would be a nice high leakage banana flavoured, yellow bait like a readymade, but I didn’t want it too in your face and I wanted it to have a nutritional value, so I wanted a readymade that isn’t a readymade, that hit you with a banana aroma but didn’t… in short I didn’t quite know what I wanted!! 
 

turning to premier, I ordered my usual 10kg of supermarinos basemix and also ordered 10kg of premier milk protein/birdfood basemix which they recommended for winter use. 
Tony also threw in a free bottle of monster crab/shellfish sense appeal blended flavour free of charge as he knew I use it - legend! 
 

now, I knocked up a quick mix of the birdfood mix with 5ml of CC Moore banana flavour - which smells exactly as I remember the old richworth bait to smell like, perfect! I used 10ml of salmon oil, which didn’t sit right with me, it didn’t quite match if you know what I mean! 
 

initial thoughts? The basemix wasn’t quite as “predictable” as the fish meals I'm used to rolling, I found the mix dried out and shrank, making it harder to roll and squeeze out of the boilie gun, some baits also split on rolling, so some work was needs there getting the mixture right. The resulting baits turned out ok, the flavour profile felt right to the nose, but I felt I could improve on the mix. 
 

when I first started bait making, I used carp company fruit frenzy basemix with essential bait fruit factor 6, which had a lovely “zingy” flavour,

I then in 1998 discovered premier Aminos basemix with green lipped mussel and richworth boiled ham flavour or rod Hutchinson mixed herbs flavour - that was a killer flavour! I’ve used premier base mixes ever since.

I was straight onto essential baits for a tub of fruit factor 6, I also found a bulk oil, “fruit seed oil” a blend of vegetable oils and fruit esters, that felt more in keeping with the bait then the salmon oil, so that went into the basket too, finally a bottle of thaumatin red (a fruity intense sweetener) also ended up heading my way… bring on the bait making! 
 

so this time, I added 1/2tsp of fruit factor 6, 0.5ml of thaumatin red, 20ml of fruit seed oil and 5ml of banana flavour to six eggs then added the milk protein/birdfood basemix slowly until I got it to the point that the mix was still slightly sticky. Giving it 10min to rest left it in the perfect state to go through the gun and roll nicely without any splitting. 
the baits were given a 1min 20sec boil that gave them a nice skin with a slightly rubbery texture, and to the nose they have a lovely banana/fruity undertone. They are a nice pale honeycomb shade with birdfood flecks. 
 

so have I achieved the “readymade/not readymade” bait ready for winter? Who knows!! I’ll give it a go on a few waters during quick 3-4hr sessions whilst my daughter is in nursery to see how acceptable the concoction is to my local carp, if they like it, then I’ll start trickling it into the winter waters to get them used to it. (Do we even need to do this anymore? I still do anyway…) 

my next project?? I have 20 x 2m black 28mm rigid conduit pipes, a can of expanding foam and a baiting spoon to see if I can fashion a DIY baiting pole for around £40-50… 

It’s amazing where your mind goes when you’re bottle feeding at 3am! 

[Golden Paws]

I had a mate who was into making his own bait and he pointed me in the right direction. For a while I started producing my own bait but a blank session had me wondering if the bait was the problem and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole!

Now I buy my bait off one of the bait barons! They sell a fair bit of the stuff and plenty of people seem to catch on it and that's good enough for me. Admittedly there isn't the same satisfaction of catching on a bait you made but the trade off is that I don't now blame the bait I buy if I blank!

That said, I've caught over 80% of my fish (155 in 2026 so far) on a change bait as I started to think that carp were treating all boilies with suspicion. Instead of following the crowd, I decided to mix it up and do something different to all the other anglers on the lakes I fish.

[salokcinnodrog]

I used to make my own bait from the 1980's through to 2000's.

The early years were making baits from scratch, koi pellet powder, semolina, Chappie dog food and casein were ingredients used in homemade baits, then from around 1991 it was New Concept Mariner Mix, which actually outfished Premier and Nutrabaits Big Fish Mix. Phil and I and other anglers were putting so much in to Taverham Mills we rarely blanked. 

When New Concept was bought by Bob Church and Mariner Mix became unavailable I moved back to Suffolk and switched to The Biollox for years until Trigga was released.

The only reason I started getting bait made for me was with a new family I couldn't find time to make bait at a time that suited my partner. She'd moan at me for leaving a mess and the smell.

The Trigga recipe I had was brilliant and even Ken Townley and Nutrabaits found I had improved it from standard.

A bait company took me on as a genuine tester, and their baits pretty much worked.

It was only when they started screwing other customers around cutting baits I walked away after standing up for them.

I now pretty much buy all my bulk bait, although every now and again to use up my left over deadbaits at the end of pike season I liquidise them, mix them with semolina and maize meal and make around 5kilos of boilies for fishing.

I am not a fan of attractor baits, still preferring long term food source boilies, and still feed session leftovers in as I leave.

 

 

[crusian]

Congratulations on the addition to your family , Ouch .

🚼

[ouchthathurt]

1 hour ago, salokcinnodrog said:

 

I am not a fan of attractor baits, still preferring long term food source boilies, and still feed session leftovers in as I leave.

 

 

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 

[ouchthathurt]

27 minutes ago, crusian said:

Congratulations on the addition to your family , Ouch .

🚼

Many thanks mate!