Do washed out baits make a difference?

I can’t recall if this has been covered here previously, so forgive me if it has, but talking about boilies lead me onto a tactic I used at Yateley during the last few seasons, and that is using washed out, or rehydrated baits. My prep starts 24hrs before a session and to a bucket of steaming, hot freshly cooked hemp, complete with all the cooking liquor I will add one of my small jars of prepared nuts. I keep small 1ltr jars of blended tigers, brazils and peanuts in the freezer that have already been steeped just to the gloopy, sticky turning point so I have a supply ready for whenever I need them. To this almost impossibly carpy smelling nutty, hempy concoction I add a couple of kilos of my freezer bait and leave it to steep in the warm, oily water until it gets dispatched into the lake when I arrive a day later.

What I get, by the time the baits are actually in the lake, is a boilie with a beautifully washed out appearance, but one that is literally already saturated to the core with the hemp and nut liquids. I always felt that on a venue that sees fresh boilies every 24-48hrs on the changeover (CP has a 48hr rule) it had to be a massive edge to be using baits that would appear to have already been out there for a considerable amount of time, and most importantly feel like that when eaten by a carp. As quite a few of my bites (three out of the four mirrors – Dustbin, Pearly and Baby O) came within just a few hours of hoiking a huge bucket of it in, I guess something about the tactic worked nicely! Has anyone else any experience of using washed out baits, I am convinced they get eaten considerably quicker and with more confidence than baits straight from the bag? Gaz Fareham

Although your free offerings would have appeared washed-out and had a nice soft texture, I think probably the biggest reason for that method being a real winner was the particle liquor, Gaz. The paler colour and softer texture is good, but the lovely water-soluble attraction oozing from your particle liquor would have been mega.

I do a similar thing myself mate. Most of the particles that I use nowadays are the pre-prepared ones from Dynamite. The hemp is as good as it gets and so are the tigers, but just as valuable to me is the juice that they’re cooked in. The hemp juice gets drained off, frozen into old soup containers and I use it for soaking boilies, or in the case of the roach fishing on the Thames that I touched on earlier, even for moistening down groundbait. And the tiger juice I save for re-boiling my maize and other bits and bobs in.

Frozen particle broths and liquors. I always save the juices for soaking boilies or cooking more particles in. Yes, broccoli and stilton’s my fave at the moment…

The best liquor is the stuff that I’ve already re-cycled a couple of times, by which stage it’s much thicker, more starchy and more broth-like with plenty of fine solids. Man, I could drink it myself, full of good stuff! When I splash a load of this over frozen baits, once thawed they end up with an almost powdery but moist layer over them.

Last November I had a good catch of fish from an Oxfordshire water after pre-baiting with a big hit of bait that I’d absolutely saturated in particle liquors which I’d been saving up in the freezer. In fact, right now I could do with using up some of mine as my freezer’s stuffed with it. There’s just so much attraction there which is natural and truly water-soluble, and once you’ve used bait like that it’s hard to go back to straightforward dry baits. Always a good idea to save your liquids. Keep catching ‘em.

One from the ‘Shire of Ox’ last November (I thought it sounded more carpy than OX29). Boilies soaked in particle broth certainly proved effective that trip