Bait According To... Shaun Harrison

The bait that changed everything was the boilie recipe I came up with to fish Patshull Park’s Church Pool syndicate over 30 years ago. Patshull was riddled with eels at the time, and fishing boilies during the summer months was just about impossible. I came up with a combination that they didn’t like but the carp loved. When Nashbait started, the base mix became known as Amber Attract, and the blend of essential oils I used in it became known as Sting Oil. Not only did it allow me to fish boilies in the warmer months, it also taught me the very important lesson that winter baits don’t need to have lots of artificial flavours leaching out. That bait was a superb winter catcher.

The game-changing baiting moment which changed everything for me was when I stopped being brainwashed by others and went my own way. I had been totally sold on high protein, the accepted norm among switched-on anglers in the ’80s. Authorities on bait hammered home how important such baits were in winter, yet I saw few account for winter captures. I reasoned that a high-protein diet binds most creatures up. It seemed logical, therefore, that carp eating high-protein baits would take quite some time to digest them, and so there’d be a longer period before they fed again. Once I diluted my 80 per cent-plus milk-protein baits, I never looked back.

The last bait-related items I bought and loved were various boilie crushers and cutters. I have always broken up boilies and never has this been so easy. It used to take me an absolute age doing one boilie at a time.

In my bait bag you’ll always find the three Ps: paste, PVA and pop-ups, yet I rarely pop baits up. I like to use baits that are part pop-up and part bottom bait. My hookbaits, then, are fractionally lighter than my freebies, rather than being wafters.

I don’t have an excessive collection of pop-ups, glugs, wafters or whatever, as I get rid of bait I have not used during a certain period, depending on its make-up. I do, though, have a lot of books.

A baiting trick/method that was super successful in the past but I’d forgotten about was basically the same boilie recipe, but with baits rolled in six different colours, just like a tube of Smarties. On a certain reservoir, I had a ridiculous number of fish one season on these baits. Using a catapult, I fed three of each colour every 30 minutes or so. In two separate day sessions I caught more in the one day—over 20 carp—than most members caught over a full season. The interesting thing was that through the day, the carp definitely showed a preference for hookbaits of a particular colour. It was a two-rod water and I fished it like a match angler. If nothing happened during a 30-minute spell, I would change hookbaits for a different colour. Once I’d had a take, I would put the same colour on both rods and would enjoy a quick flurry of action before I needed to find the next successful colour, and I had several weeks of incredible angling.

I don’t get influenced by baits as all the biggest steps forward I have made have been of my own doing. Going against the grain worked incredibly well for me when I first diluted my milk-protein baits with a little roughage back in the ’80s, as I’ve touched on earlier. This basically told me to stop listening to others when it came to bait, unless they could back up what they were saying with a healthy album of photographs. To me, captures and bobbin activity impress me far more than someone spouting science. Remember, the best food for us to eat, isn’t the food we would rather eat.

 What is my preferred baiting approach nowadays? For the style of carping I favour and on the types of venue I fish, I like to spread bait. I thought the Spomb was the best invention in carp angling for a long while, but given all the copies out there too, most anglers are presenting a very similar feeding area. I like a fair spread, and not too much. I want the carp actively looking for and wanting the bait, and not sitting there gorging themselves on one spot. That’s probably why I usually get decent hook-holds. Fishing on a dinner plate obviously catches carp, but it certainly isn’t my preferred way of going about it. I like the idea of hooking a carp, and then another feeding a few metres away, oblivious of what has just happened.

My preferred hookbait colour goes back to the ’80s. I had a monthly column in David Hall’s Coarse Fisherman magazine. One day we were chatting on the phone—there were no emails, mobile phones or even fax machines back then—and he said to me, “I don’t understand you carp anglers. You fire out loads of yellow boilies, and then cast a yellow one out, expecting the carp to find it quickly, among all the others. When we match-fish, we will perhaps feed bronze maggots, but cast a red one out, or a white or a yellow.”

This was one of those moments when what was said really sunk in, and my next session on Patshull saw me armed with different-coloured hookbaits. That was another moment in my angling career that pushed me up another step. To this day, I vary the colour of my hookbait all the time.

My hookbaits are always small. It is extremely rare for me to have a hookbait larger than 10mm, be that a previously bigger but cut-down bait or whatever. Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I cast out a round hookbait, I always trim them to whatever shape I feel is right at the time.

My preferred size of free food is for my offerings to be mixed and broken; I don’t do uniformity. I am very much a boilie angler and always like to have 10, 15 and 20mm boilies with me. I will add that I hardly ever bait up with just one type of boilie. Usually there will be three different baits in my bucket, sometimes more and rarely fewer.

My best bait edge is something I have rewritten about and spoken of in front of the camera far too many times now. I give my boilies a drink before use, so to speak, to soak liquid in rather than them being washed out. Anglers get these two things mixed up. It allows me to tweak a bait, depending on the time of the year and what I am presenting the baits over.