How to improve fishing with boilies

Although I used to own a bait company, selling silly amounts of boilies on a daily basis, I actually very rarely used them in my personal fishing. I was a particle and pellet man you see, fishing for big hits and trying to catch as many carp as I could during my time on the bank. I usually always caught plenty of carp wherever I went, but I’d always seem to land the smaller fish, while the ‘big fish anglers’ around me tended to have less bites, but the average size was considerably bigger.

I always knew that I’d catch bigger fish if I used boilies, but I just loved getting bites. When I started developing the Code Red boilie range with Sonubaits, I made a conscious effort to start using boilies more frequently, because I wanted to see if an all-out boilie approach would enable me to catch some larger carp. The results were absolutely astounding from the off and I still cannot believe how much boilie fishing has transformed my fishing. I’ve caught more big fish in the last couple of years than I did in a decade before.

1. Hookbait colour

I used to be of the impression that food-coloured hookbaits should be fished over beds of bait, while hi-viz pop-ups work best when fished as singles. So what changed? Well, I started playing around with different colours over bait and have found that a whole host of factors can affect which colour works on the day – most we will never be able to work out. To keep my options open, I always fish a ‘bright’ and a ‘dull’ over my baited area, because you can never really know which one is going to produce.

2. Glugged hookbaits

I’ve always been a huge fan of glugging hookbaits, especially when fishing over large beds of bait. When fishing over standard freebies, the glugged baits release a steady stream of attraction and stand out like a sore thumb on the bottom. They are much more likely to be picked up and, more often than not, are the first hookbait to go, even when fishing over lots of bait.

3. Let 'em have it

If you want to make the most of your boilie fishing, I think it’s important to bait with them correctly. If the conditions are poor and the fish aren’t having it, there’s no need to go overboard. If the opposite is true and the fish are feeding, let them have it. I’d think nothing about putting three kilos out to begin with and would be confident of action quickly. More often than not, the more you put in, the more you catch.

Extra tip #1: Boilie crumb

How much attraction does your foodbait kick-out? If you’re not glugging them, then not a lot. And what’s the first thing you do whenever you smell a boilie? You break it apart, right – i.e. breaking the seal – so imagine how much attraction you’d be kicking out by blending up a kilo of 18mmers?! And add an oil to it and you’ve increasing its attraction properties even further.

Extra tip #2: Tight baiting

Read or watch anything related to boilies and we’ll guarantee you one thing: you’ll be told to “spread the boilies around to get the fish moving between each one”. However, as Nigel Sharp told us last year, “On pressured lakes, I like to do the complete opposite to everyone else” and he did just that at Redmire Pool in 2007 where he landed 13 fish – a previous unheard of amount!