Give Your Boilies A Drink!
It’s a rarely used tactic by the masses that carp fishing veteran and bait expert Shaun Harrison calls “almost cheating at times”, and here’s how you do it...
I would say that apart from getting onto the Hair rig in the early days, my hemp juice-filled boilies were the biggest edge I have ever had in my carp angling career; it almost felt like I was cheating at times,” reveals Shaun.
You only need to drop one of his hemp juice-filled boilie in the edge to see why it worked so well… “There could be no fish swim over a bed of these rehydrated baits without breathing in the hemp aroma. They pump out tiny trails a long period of time, particularly if you go to the trouble of totally air-drying the boilies first before ‘giving them a drink’, as I call it. When totally dry, a pint of dried boilies will drink half a pint of liquid and still look like a normal bait but will ooze with a product you cannot be rolled into a bait in those quantities in the first place.”
Sounds brilliant, right? Well, they are, but there are some minor downsides. You have to start to prepare your bait a couple of days before you are ready to go fishing. Forget the throwing stick—the soft baits will explode. “To me, this is no big deal, as most of the waters I fish, as soon as a stick is used, the gulls appear from nowhere, so I just Spomb them out.”
The final one is nuisance fish, which find the softer baits easier to peck away at and eat. “Personally, I actually welcome this, as there is no bigger stimulation for a carp to feed than seeing other fish feed,” concludes Shaun.
Right, here’s how you “give your boilies a drink”…
Things To Note:
- Air-drying the bait first helps maximise how much liquid they will take on.
- The liquid needs to be thin to ensure they ‘drink’ as much as possible, and this is why hemp liquid is so good.
- Remember, this process takes around 48hr, so factor that in when it comes to your preparation.
Your Timeline:
1. Wednesday evening
Start off by preparing your liquid. Ideally, this would be the juice from cooked particles—particularly hempseed—but if you don’t have any freshly prepared hemp, then you can use the liquid from the pre-prepared stuff.
2. Wednesday evening cont.
Once your liquid is sorted, the boilies go in to soak. On the Wednesday, start off by putting in your 15mm baits first.
3. Thursday
Now drop in your 10mm baits.
4. Friday
On the Friday morning, add your broken boilies and then a couple of hours before you’re expecting to be starting fishing, stir everything together and possibly add dry ingredients to soak any excess liquid should you feel the boilies have drunk as much as they can.
