We Need To Talk About... Bait!

“And your paste must be thus made: take the flesh of a rabbit or a cat cut small, and bean flour, and then mix these together and put to them sugar or honey.” Izaak Walton, 1653

This 370-year-old Izaak quote reveals the godfather of UK angling was surprisingly advanced in the bait department, utilising some startling ingredients: anyone got a dead cat? 

Anyway, moving swiftly on, it’s worth noting that the search for an ultimate bait is still a hot and controversial topic: I refer you m’lord to recent rumours about the use of hormones. And while I concede there are many awesome baits about these days, I don’t now devote much time to the alchemy of bait-making. At the risk of being controversial, I have to say there’s more rubbish written about bait than any other aspect of carp fishing. No, hang on a minute, maybe it’s rigs. Let’s settle for there is a lot of rubbish written about bait and rigs, most of which, if you catch me in one of my more combative moods, is primarily designed to catch anglers rather than fish. I know, how very dare I?

However, it was not always the case. In my younger days, imagining and devising bait, being a cunning carp chef, was an obsession, an essential and fascinating part of the cult. Uncle Phil inducted me into the mysterious alchemy of boilie-making, not quite gold from lead, but in my carp-fevered mind, close enough. His ‘secret’ mix of mashed luncheon meat, crushed Weatabix, Marmite and, of course, eggs were the ‘deadly combo’ which tempted my first ever carp, a tatty little six-pounder, on the opening day of the 1976 season. I was 11 and deeply hooked! Our kitchen became my bait lab, filled with supermarket-sourced powders, packets, tins and bottles. Myriad pungent aromas wafted around the house, and much to mum’s annoyance, stacks of unwashed pans filled the sink and her freshly laundered tea towels were loaded with drying boiled specials.

Over the next few years, various concoctions were developed involving ingredients such as Kit-E-Cat, Banana Nesquick, Whiskas and trout pellets. Alas, my early baits were only modestly successful at best, but with the publication of Kevin Maddocks’ book Carp Fever I was transported to 1980s bait-making heaven. I was suddenly in a marvellous and mysterious world full of sodium caseinate, lactalbumin, soya flour and semolina, combined with amazing additives such as Robin Red and legendary flavours including Bun Spice and Geoff Kemp’s Dairy Cream.

Two other things happened around this time which revolutionised our carp fishing: the hair rig was revealed to all, transforming twitchy takes into screaming runs, and a short while later, Richworth stormed the carp scene with their ready-made Tutti Frutti boilies. Modern carp fishing had arrived! Being essentially a lazy sod, I rapidly became a shop-bought boilie boy, and over the next twenty years, changed my bait almost as much as my underpants, convinced every new recipe would send my catch-rate into orbit. They didn’t! Over the years particular favourites have been:

Tutti Frutti (Richworth)
Salmon Caviar & Black Pepper BFM (Nutrabaits)
Scopex Squid (Nash)
The Source (Dynamite)
Belachan Shrimp (Mistral)
The Goodness (Rob Farrant)

Of course, I was aware of the power of particles. I had read Yates and Hutchinson and experimented with chickpeas, black-eyed beans and sweetcorn. But somehow, these baits weren’t so appealing. Particles didn’t seem as modern or ultra-cult as boilies. It wasn’t until I discovered the miraculous tiger nut in the ’90s that I really became a particle enthusiast. Great big buckets of fermenting tigers transformed my fishing. The older, gloopier and more pungent, the better they seemed to perform. This was followed by a period of peanut worship, which quickly became frowned upon as people piled them in way beyond what was reasonable or sensible. 

And then, in the early 2000s, I had a profound religious experience, I became a golden niblet evangelist, a sweetcorn disciple. Perhaps it was again laziness and my lightweight wallet which sent me back to the discovery made by Chris Yates at the holy shrine of Redmire: all carp love sweetcorn! Whatever it was, the carp gods had spoken, I was converted to the convenience of a constant supermarket supply chain, confident in the knowledge that only my angling incompetence could impede success. The sweetcorn kid was born!

When plastic and foam baits appeared on the scene, I dabbled, but my heart wasn’t in it. Maybe they were just a bit too 21st-century for an old dog like me. I know they work, but somehow could never quite bring myself to cast out two fake niblets of corn. I have used them, with great success, as tippers for boilies, but always prefer juicy real niblets on the hair to the durable, bright and undeniably ingenious plastic alternatives. I feel the same way about foam. If you’ve read me before, you know how I feel about Zigs, but when I occasionally employed pieces of flip-flop suspended in mid-water, I invariably felt the urge to attach maggots. Carp fishing is a confidence game, and I always need something organic on my rig.

Call me out of touch, stuck in my ways, but until recently, I’d managed to avoid pop-ups on my rigs for 45 years. That was until I saw one of the Cypography underwater films where it was undeniable that the carp were singling out Elliot’s Scent From Hell hookbaits. I tried them; they’re brilliant! To my great surprise, I became an unplanned unsponsored evangelist for this superb Baitworks product. And then I got the nod from a secret squirrel on Longreach that Handcraft Baits Sting pop-ups are also a major edge. And at the risk of appearing Kordarised, both these baits seem to be enhanced when soaked in Squid Goo! I know, believe me, I’m still a little shocked every time the buzzer shrieks, and I think, ‘It’s the pop-ups and Goo what did it!’

So, as I approach my fifth decade of carping, while publicly professing atheism on the existence of a secret ingredient from the carp gods, I am, in truth, agnostic, ever susceptible and open to evidence of a game changer. Hopeful to discover the hair rig of the bait department! At present, that is largely a fascination for sniffing my Scent From Hells while muttering, surely not. And yet, despite this newfound enthusiasm for a pink pop-up, come the summer, the profound particle passion returns, and my hookbait of choice is once again the yellow wonder grains or some kind of nut.