Choosing a Winter Bait - Quest Baits

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|IIII|IIII|40gms700mlsWe all have good baits at our disposaland I don’t want this series to runalong the lines of ‘use this, usethat’, or ‘do this, do that’ because there areplenty of magazines out there catering forthis type of thing. What I do want to try toachieve is to simply put over a few ideas, alittle ‘food for thought’ to get the old greymatter ticking over.These days, in my own angling, I findmyself starting to question everything. Someof the major steps forward I have made inmore recent years have been from goingagainst what is normally accepted. After all,if someone says something often enoughit will be accepted and eventually taken asgospel. It is very difficult to turn away fromgms something you so believe is right, but thebrave ones who do so can find themselvesstumbling upon something just that little160gms bit special. There are so many excellent baitscurrently available to anglers that the days ofhaving 150gms to spend hours at home formulating120gmsyour own concoctions 140gms are130gmsalmost over. Well,that’s until we come to the subject of baitsfor winter fishing.|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|I|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|So many commercially available baitscan be far from ideal when it comes totempting the carp living in a cold-waterenvironment. Just because you have baitwhich takes waters apart during the warmermonths certainly doesn’t mean it will do thesame during the cold days of winter. It is myhumble opinion that the one major factorwhy so many carp anglers struggle to cometo terms with winter carp fishing is that theymake it difficult for themselves from thestart by offering something with little coldwaterattraction. So why is it, then, that anexcellent summer bait won’t necessarily be sogood during the winter?The fi rst sunrise of 2007, the fi rst day ofJanuary and I was still hopeful of a bite.1“My findings comefrom years of sittingbehind rods andhaving a great interestand willingness toexperiment. I also putmyself out to actuallywatch carp at all timesof the year, and notalways fish for them”Now, let me put this across right fromthe very start. I am not a chemist and Ihaven’t studied fish biology. My findingsEarly ’80s winter capture.come from years of sitting behind rodsand having a great interest and willingnessto experiment. I have also put myselfout to actually watch carp at all times ofthe year, and not always fish for them.The natural activity of carp can be verydifferent to their activity once they areaware of rigs and lines in the water. I learna lot from both scenarios. Waters whereyou can observe carp subject to anglingpressure during the coldest of conditionsare extremely few and far between in myexperience, but if you visit enough venuesyou will eventually stumble across a fewfish. Not only is this incredibly useful forlogging their reaction to different baitsand food sources, but it can also showhow very inefficient many rigs can be.The first major shock for me wasexactly how slow the carp move around ina natural state in the cold. It is possiblyworth reminding everyone here that carpare cold-blooded. The colder it is, theslower their metabolism. If a carp takes abait and heads back towards the lead witheven a shortish six-inch hooklength, thatbait can be in the mouth for a very longtime before they hit the resistance of alead – lots of time to eject the rig. Notonly that, but the slow motion movementsI observe make it most unlikely that thefish will hit the lead hard enough to prickitself. However this is all for another dayand another article. Let’s get back to bait.My findings come simply from bothobservation and bobbin action. They arenot armchair theories that ‘should’ beright. I have lost count of the numberof those I have read about. My findingsare based purely on actual anglingapplication.So, what do I look for when producing abait specifically to catch cold-water carp?From my own point of view it comes downto how well I know the water I’m fishing.If I know the carp are in the area I amfishing then I will use a slightly differenttype of bait than I would use at a venuewith which I wasn’t familiar. I often mixand match on the same water anyway,rather than have all my eggs in one basket.500ml400ml300ml200mlBait Quest Shaun Harrison650400m300m200ml17100ml100 l016_Bait_Quest.indd 3 16/1/07 18:31:07
III|IIII|220gmsBait Quest Shaun HarrisonS H A U N H A R R I S O NBAIT QUESTAwesome – anotherwinter capture at 28lb.ms170gmsI|IIII|IIII|MAXThe same day I had the 28 (right), I’mseen here playing a 24lb true winter carp.First and foremost, and this applies toboth types of winter bait, I want a bait thatis very highly digestible and contains enoughsoluble ingredients to allow the natural andadded attractors to leak out in cold water– but not leak out so fast that I am left withno taste to the bait. Quite simple really.I would now like to take a look back at myown winter fishing, simply to illustrate thatI have actually caught winter carp for a longperiod of time from a lot of different venues.My findings aren’t based on just one or twowaters over a period of a couple of years, asI have been fortunate to have been catchingwinter carp since the 1970s, from the dayswhen I was a young kid with attitude.Fortunately, punk rock came at the right0gmstime 10gms and gave me a way of offloading someof my anger without the need to take it out20gmson others. Fish and fishing has always beenmy wind-down.30gmsSo, in the ’70s I used to catch them onquite fast-dissolving paste baits simplybecause this is all I knew and I didn’t know40gmshow to keep the paste held together for long.I didn’t know about binders and gels andother bits like that. Boilies were unheard ofwhere I fished, or I certainly didn’t know 50gmsabout them. Paste baits were generallyreferred to as ‘specials’ and eventually Istarted to read about skinned baits, which60gmseventually became known as boilies.Some of my early paste baits were, in fact,quite effective, and probably would still be18 today in cold-water conditions. I had no70gmsII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIII|IIproper bait ingredients, so used to raid mymother’s cupboards. I used to start with agroundbait base, crushed up biscuits andcereals. I would raid the flour tub, nick thecat’s food, etc., etc. Anything would be triedand thrown together and my early recipebooks got very dog-eared. It was a massivelearning curve, but, looking back, some ofthose very simple baits were, in fact, quiteuseful cold-water carp-catching baits.“I consider myself mostfortunate to havebeen around at thetime many of the wellusedingredients firstbecame available tothe angler and I wasable to take each oneand play around with it”As the ’70s turned into the ’80s I gotmyself a job in the tackle trade, at Walkersof Trowell. Here I started to develop thethen non-existent carp angling side of theshop.Soon we had a few bait ingredientsfrom Bait 78, Duncan Kay’s Slyme Baits,and then Mick Winterton’s Key AnglingSupplies. I consider myself most fortunateto have been around at the time many ofthe well-used ingredients first becameavailable to the angler and I was ableto take each one and play around withit, finding out exactly what I could andcouldn’t do with it. As the years progressedwe stocked more and more ingredients,from Rod Hutchinson’s Catchum Baits,SBS, and a few more, until suddenlyJoe Public no longer wanted individualingredients. The idle age had arrived, whereanglers no longer needed to know whateach ingredient did. The suppliers wereputting together perfectly good base mixes,and latterly ready-rolled baits.Those formative years, however, were sovery useful for me. I grew, as the bait listsgrew. I read everything I possibly couldabout bait, and actually ended up becomingvery sidetracked from my own thoughtsbecause of what was being written by others.I actually suffered two very poor winters, allbecause I was taking as gospel what othershad written.Like everyone else at the time, I travelledalong the high protein, milk protein route.Most anglers would end up with a bait ofaround 80% protein. I caught fish on them.I caught a lot of fish on them – but notin the winter. People who I had immenserespect for kept plugging on about droppingfishmeals off in the winter and changingover to milk protein-type baits. Now, Inever used to use fishmeals anyway, but Idid start changing over to high proteintypebaits in the winter. I caught odd fishbut nothing like the number I was used tocatching. Two years on and I reverted backto my lowered protein baits, and suddenly Iwas catching those carp again.The milk proteins in winter stood for solong, but this type of bait certainly didn’twork very well for me, despite all the socalledwinter anglers of the day advocatingtheir use. It all became clear in my mind’seye after a chance viewing of sometelevision programme which I wouldn’t haveusually bothered watching (whilst channelhopping).The telephone rang and thetelevision continued. Whilst talking on thetelephone I heard something along the linesof protein taking a long while to digest andprotein binding up people. It was like a bellringing in my head.1016_Bait_Quest.indd 4 16/1/07 18:31:17
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