I am often asked to recommend a recipe for a cheap yet nutritious and long lived boiled bait. Well to be honest that is asking the impossible. You see, the words cheap and nutritious don’t sit well in a sentence, and if you add long lasting as well it becomes even less plausible. However, here is a bait that should last a summer or a bit longer. It is affordable, versatile and easy to make. I’ll go through the procedure step by step.
• First you will need some good quality pellets.
• You will also need some top quality birdfood such as Red Factor™ or Nectarblend™ shown here:
• Mix equal amounts of both ingredients together (say 250g of each), and then blend them to a fine powder in a grinder
• Take four eggs and add your favourite flavours and attractors. A good blend to try is Black pepper Oil and Peach flavour.
• Blend the powder, the eggs and the attractors together to form a ball of paste. Set aside about 100g of raw paste.
• Instead of rolling the baits out in the usual way instead roll them into sausages like this:
• Boil the sausages for about 3 minutes and allow them to cool and then take ¾ of the sausages and dice them with a sharp knife first into four strips
• …and then into small irregular-shaped boiled shapes
• Now take the rest of the sausages and cut them into chunks (as seen here on the left). These will form your hookbaits. You will now be left with the small irregular shaped boiled baits, the cut sausage hookbaits and a lump of raw paste mix
• Mount two or three hookbaits on a standard bottom bait rig such as this one
• The finally mould some of the paste around the hook and hookbaits like this:
SINGLE HOOKBAITS
With the autumn months approaching now might be the time to try a single hookbait approach on your lake, as in all likely hood the carp will have been bombarded with barrage after barrage of boilies for several months now. It follows that a single high attract hookbait may just be the answer to your prayers.
A bait that works brilliantly when fished in isolation as a single hookbait is the tiger nut. Carp, as we all know, adore the little beauties and their attraction is such that you can have total confidence in a single tiger fished as a hookbait.
Always use the freshest nuts such as the ones from Haith's®. Prepare then as normal but rather than allow them to ferment try to use them straight from the pan. I once thought that all that tiger nut slime was the main source of attraction but more and more I am coming around to the belief that tiger nuts are at their very best within 24-36 hours of coming out of the boiling pan.
Single tigers have brought me numerous fish when a standard carpet of bait has failed.
Written by Ken Townley
