Bait According To... Simon Crow

Was there a game-changing baiting method or approach that altered everything for you…
“Yes, there’s been quite a few throughout my carping career. The most stand out, however, happened in the mid-1990s. I was sitting in the Carp-Talk office with three absolute carping giants: Tim Paisley, Rod Hutchinson and Kevin Clifford. The subject was big fish baits, and I was asked my thoughts on the subject. I said I didn’t believe they existed. The next thing, I received an ear-bashing from all three of them, telling me how wrong I was! My brain was totally frazzled by what they were saying, but over the next few years I started to open up to it. I saw how important bait is for big carp, and almost thirty years on from that ‘lesson’, I now laugh at the young Crowy. 

“Experience in carp fishing is totally invaluable. There is no substitute for it, and big fish baits most definitely exist. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I’ve covered the topic extensively in CARPology so I won’t go over old grown again here. If you want to know more, have a look at the series I wrote a couple of years ago about catching big carp. I also cover the topic in a vlog on my YouTube channel, titled ‘How To Target Big Carp’.”

Have your thoughts and opinions on the appropriate size of free offerings changed over the years? Do you prefer to use a bed of 10mm baits, for example, or are you happy with 18mm?
“I use all different sizes of baits. It’s important to not be blinkered into using just one because you’ll find yourself falling short on occasion, especially if you fish lots of different waters. As an example, when I fished Yateley’s Little Moulsham a couple of years ago, I went in with my ‘go-to’ method, which is to use bigger baits. I love fishing like this because so many UK anglers use small stuff. I think it gives me an edge being different to everyone else. However, when I joined Moulsham, I’d been told the carp in there didn’t like big baits. Having heard that kind of thing countless times before and proving the theory wrong, I just carried on with 18mm boilies. Ten nights on without a fish to my name, and watching everyone else bagging up, I had to eat humble pie! As soon as I changed to the small baits, I then started catching, and not long after I went on to catch my main two targets from the lake.”

Do you introduce feed on a little and often basis, or do you prefer to bait up and then leave the swim undisturbed?
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about carp fishing over the years it’s that the more versatile you are as an angler, the more successful you’ll be. For this reason I use both methods. I’m generalising here, but mostly I use the little and often tactic when fishing shorter sessions, and I’ll go with the ‘fill it in’ method when I’ve a few days ahead of me. However, it depends on the venue too, because you’ll need to adapt to the stock level, acreage of water and how often you’re fishing it.”

By using large quantities of bait, perhaps the extreme, have you or someone you know, outfished the rest of the anglers on a lake?
“I rarely out-fish everyone else on the lakes I fish. There are so many good carp anglers around, it’s almost impossible to do things like that nowadays, regardless of how some lads like to say they do. Also, I don’t go carp fishing to catch loads of carp any more. I’m more of a target angler. I go after certain fish, plotting the downfall of the ones I want, rather than trying to catch one after another. There are methods you can use to catch more carp but I don’t like using them because I’ve learned it’s not the best way to target the bigger ones. To answer your question then, yes I have done very well on a water by putting out loads of bait. When I fished at Woldview in Lincolnshire I was prebaiting and the carp were on it big time. The more bait I put out, the more I caught. I can remember doing ten-hour trips there while fishing over 10kg of bait! It was crazy fishing, the fish coming to it almost as soon as I put it in.”

Have you ever used anything unusual as a hookbait which has caught you a bonus fish or two?
“Yes, quite a few times. The weirdest one was in 1990 when I saw a carp take a fag butt off the surface while I was surface fishing a park lake in Wolverhampton. I’d spent an hour chasing that fish on bread, but as soon as I switched to an old fag butt I found on the floor, I hooked him straight away! That was the craziest of them all, and something of an oddity because I’ve never caught a carp on a fag butt since! One bait I’ve used quite a lot that not many lads use, is raisons. I’ve had quite a lot of carp on these, especially when fishing over big beds of hemp. I don’t know why they work well over hemp, but whenever I’ve used them over other baits they don’t seem to do as well.”

Do you believe that balancing hookbaits is unnecessary, or is it something we can overdo, in theory making them react unnaturally?
“This method was all the rage in the late 1980s when I was learning my carping apprenticeship. It caught me absolutely tons of fish. Then, during the freezer bait boom at the start of the 90s, I remember seeing a lad regularly out-fish me using bottom baits straight out of the bag. He was using Richworth Tropicana boilies. I think the carp in our local lake had seen so many ‘criticals’ (as we called them back in those days), that they couldn’t cope with the heavier bottom baits the lad was using. From that day onwards, I was a total convert, and I’ve been a fan of ‘out of the bag’ boilies ever since. Of course, there are times when I’ll still use pop-ups and ‘criticals’ (now known as wafters), but mostly you’ll see me using straight-from-the-bag boilies.”

What are your thoughts on re-freezing boilies?
“No problem at all. I still do it today and I’ve never noticed any drop in catch-rate from doing it. I won’t keep on refreezing the baits, though, because the more you do it, the softer they become and the more prone to freezer burn they are. It will always depend on the mix, but generally, the most I’ll refreeze a bait is three times.”

Also, are you one for using boilies straight out of the freezer, or do you prefer to let them thaw out, perhaps glazing them with a liquid?   
“The only time I will use frozen boilies is when I’ve forgotten to take them out of the freezer before a trip! Mostly I will only use them when they are thawed. Sometimes I will add liquids when they are frozen, so the smell is drawn into them as they defrost.”

It’s an age-old question, but with years of experience on your side, do you think alien smells can taint or affect our bait or is it just a load of rubbish? These might come from anglers smoking, filling up with petrol en route, or perhaps using a hand sanitiser, which in this day and age, everyone tends to do?
“The carp’s sense of smell is a lot more defined than ours, so I’m quite paranoid about getting some things on my hands. Before I touch my rig I’ll always wash my hands in lake water, being sure to cover them in the sediment too. I’m very conscious about getting things like toothpaste or petrol on my hands, both of which repel carp. I hate hand sanitiser or creams, potions etc., which are made for humans. They all stink awful and there’s no way I’d be directly touching my rigs/baits without washing my hands in lake water after shaking hands with anyone who uses those items. My missus lathers herself in creams and she always laughs at how paranoid I am about getting those on my hands before I go fishing.”