Does buoyant plastic corn negate the weight of the hook?
Our resident diver, Rob Hughes reveals a common myth and this time around it's: ‘buoyant plastic corn will negate the weight of the hook’
How many times have you heard or even said this yourself: ‘I’m using a piece of corn to negate the weight of the hookbait and make it behave like the other freebies around it.”
This is something that I hear quite a lot, and when it comes to balancing the hook it might be true to a lesser extent, but balancing the weight of the hookbait? No chance! The boilie is actually quite a heavy item, and whilst pop-up corn is quite buoyant, it’s nowhere near buoyant enough to balance a hookbait. Think about it… a pop-up and bottom bait fished together as a snowman doesn’t lift the boilie off the bottom so a small piece of plastic never will.
A carp is a fairly simple creature and when there is food in front of it and it is hungry it will suck it in. It almost certainly can’t tell the difference between a 14mm and a 16mm bait and will use whatever power of suck it needs to get the bait into its mouth. The same goes for a hookbait that has supposedly been ‘lightened’ with the addition of a piece of corn. There simply isn’t sufficient difference between the weights of the bait to make a difference.
Once the hookbait is in the mouth, the carp will feel the alien item which is the hook and spit it out as it doesn’t want to chew on something that hard. That’s when rig efficiency comes into play and hopefully the fish will be hooked. A true, ‘critically-balanced’ bait is a different matter, as that is almost weightless, but simply ‘lightening’ with one piece of corn
is not achieving what you think it is.
To illustrate the point, I took a ‘straight out of the bag’ (slightly dried) 14mm bottom bait and wanted to see how many grains of corn it would take to ‘negate’ the weight of it. The answer was five pieces of Enterprise Pop-Up Corn to balance the bait and six to actually pop it up. If the bait was wetter you could probably add another grain of corn so you can see that if you do want to negate the weight of the boilie completely, you’d better be tying rigs with long Hairs!
