The Boilie
Where to start?. I think that we had best start with boilie’s and all of the wonder ingredients that you can purchase to make them. This subject is a veritable minefield, and if you were a soldier, you would no doubt get blown up making the journey into no mans land. Never has so much been written about a single aspect of angling. If we look at the current trend and philosophy behind carp baits, then it will serve to make the illustration.
Many years ago, carp baits consisted of bread, worms and maggots, the same baits that you would be using to catch any other species. The bread could be changed in a variety of ways, you could use it as flake, as crust, or make it into paste. In the paste, you could incorporate such things as cheese, honey, molasses etc. The maggots could also be flavoured by nicking some of your mums curry powder, or vanilla essence. They could be coloured by putting a few drops of cochineal into them. Bad for the fingers, as the stain would last for days, but cheap, as my mum used different colour food dyes when making icing for cakes she always made on a Sunday. Nothing very complicated, or very technical, but with a bit of imagination, the sky seemed the limit.
Things have moved on very quickly since those early days, when the intrepid angler would set out on his quest for the monster carp that was rumoured to lurk under the old willow tree, in the sheltered bay on some estate lake. Take a walk into any decent tackle shop, and ask to see the range of carp baits, flavour's, additives, dips, dunks, glugs and sprays etc, and all the other bits and bobs that go to make up the modern day bait arsenal that you are told you will have to indulge in, if you wish to outwit this fish. Not only new ingredients, but you now have a whole new language that has been invented to cover all eventualities. A whole industry has grown up to cater for your every wish, real or imaginary. I have visions of an old alchemist slaving over a boiling pot on an open fire, mixing and boiling with a demonical look on his face, conjuring up ever more mystical baits to tempt the angler as well as the carp. As I am just returning to angling after a long absence, I was stunned at the choice, and I have to ask myself is it all necessary, or is it all hype. I find myself caught in the middle of the debate, as on the one hand wanting to catch these fish and give myself the best chance, but erring towards the belief that we are all being conned by skilful marketing practices that are used by these bait suppliers. There can be no question that all of the baits available have caught fish at some stage or another, but that is not to say that another type of bait would not have caught just as well. There appears to be very little hard evidence concerning just how good these baits are. What is not in question is their convenience, both in availability, and also in there long life both on the shelf, and also when in water. Many years ago, I think that it was Richard Walker who said that floats in tackle shops were made to catch anglers and not fish. I feel the same can be said about the mythical properties that are bestowed on carp baits. If you can take a step back from the crowded shelves, filled by the dazzling display of baits and flavour's etc, ask yourself why a strawberry flavoured boilie, laced with green lipped mussel extract, and with a liberal dash of garlic and black pepper, should have any appeal to a carp. The list of ingredients grows by the week, with ever more unlikely items being added to it.
There is much written concerning a carps ability to recognize that a boilie which has been made from the top grade of ingredients, over the boilie made from a lower grade of ingredients. We are told that the reason for this, is that a carp knows what food is good for him, as opposed to the eating the cheaper offering. Oh yeah, that is just like saying that we as humans chose to eat salads and fruit, with lots of fibre before we elect to eat the Kentucky Fried Chicken, or the Chinese take away's, and the Indian curries. Do we elect to eat the sensible foods, even with all of our knowledge because they are good for us. Not on your life, so why should we credit the carp with an ability that we do not posses ourselves. Could it be that with slick marketing, then all of these expensive items can now be justified. It is an irrefutable fact that if you are going to throw any form of food into a water, then choose the best quality that you can find, with the highest nutritional value to a fish, not because they will find it more to their taste, but it means that you are feeding the fish well. On hard pressured waters the theory propagated by the carp men/bait suppliers, is that to stand any chance of hooking one of the few large fish that are in the immense piece of water, then you have no choice other than to use something different than the rest to give you a slightly better chance of a take. On the other hand you could argue just as persuasively that because your offering is different to the rest, then the carp will ignore it completely, simply because it is different.
To properly evaluate different baits, you would have to fish two identical set ups, one with bait A on it, and the other with bait B on it. At the end of a year, you should be able to state that one was better at catching fish than the other. As there are thousands of different combinations to this permutation, it becomes an impossible task. I have made my mind up that this year I will fish with identical set up rods and terminal tackle, with bait A being Nashie’s Tangee Squid, and bait B will be a more basic offering in the form of a sausage mixture. If I use nothing but these two baits for the year, then I will have an answer at the end of the time. If neither do very well, then I will be left wondering if one of the modern all singing all dancing whiz baits would have availed me a better response. Time will tell.
The choice of the two baits, is simply that I did manage to catch carp and tench on the Nash bait, and the sausage has a story all of its own. I was at the estate lake one day last year, and I found that I had left some of my frozen dead baits back in the car. Rather than undertake the mile walk back to the car, I decided that I would carry on fishing for the pike with a dead bait on one rod, and a large piece of sausage on the single treble of the other set up. The sausage had not been out long when there was a savage take. I picked up the rod, felt the weight of a large fish, but saw no more. The sausage was gone. I changed the end tackle to a conventional set up using two trebles, but this time I hooked a whole sausage. Again the bait was taken almost immediately. Again a quick strike, but again nothing. Looking at the sausage I could see that the first third was now missing. Out the bait went again, and the next strike saw me land a twenty pound common carp. I do not know who was more surprised, the fish or me. Here I had assumed that it was a pike, when all along it had been carp. They obviously liked the taste of the sausages. I managed to catch more carp on sausage during the rest of the year, and it was always going to be my second bait for the coming year. What the appeal of sausage is, or whether one brand of sausage is better than another, I do not know, but it reinforces my belief that almost anything that is fished in the right place, at the right time will catch carp. No doubt some baits are better than others, and trying to be opened minded about the carp bait issue, I will reserve final judgment on do we need such a wide variety of baits at least for the time being. I will try and make an evaluation on my catches compared to the other carp anglers that will be fishing the waters, as all of them will be using one of the immense range of boilie’s. That is as much as I will contribute to the boilie saga for at least the time being, as it is a subject that unless you have some qualifications, or an endless supply of money, then I feel it best to leave it alone if I can.
11-10-2001. A thought. What advantage do frozen boilie's have over shelf life ones. According to the majority of carp anglers and bait suppliers, the main reason for using frozen boilie's is that the fish find the inclusion of preservatives in the shelf like ones to be unpleasant, and that if you were to use the frozen ones that do not contain any such ingredient then the fish will respond by giving you more takes. True or false. If you take a scenario where you have a lake or piece of water that has been fished for a number of years, and everybody fishing it used shelf life boilie's (which they would have done, as no frozen boilie's were available), then because the fish had become accustomed to the taste of such offerings, there would appear to be no logic at all in the claim "that fish find the taste of preservatives to be unpleasant", to the contrary it is all they have ever known, and is what they have become accustomed to. Now if we take the same piece of water, and anglers start to put in more and more frozen boilie's, and if and when the frozen ones outnumber the shelf life ones, then and only then can a fish make a decision about which type it prefers. If NO frozen boilie's are ever introduced to the water, then the fish will never have to make the decision. Why then were frozen boilie's conceived. Was it a wish from the bait suppliers to offer the fish a food source that did not include preservatives, or was it a more commercial decision. When I use shelf life boilie's, any that I have not used I bring home and take out next time. The same thing cannot be said of the frozen ones, as at the end of the session you have little alternative other than to throw them into the water, as the likelihood is that they have thawed out and cannot be used at a later date. As you can never know for certain how many boilie's you are going to use in a session, then we all take more than necessary, leading to a percentage of frozen ones having to be thrown in at the end of the day. Nothing wrong with that as you could claim that it was going to feed the fish in your absence, and helping the fish to become accustomed to your boilie type. Unfortunately the choice of what type you use, i.e. shelf life or frozen may ultimately be made for you. This is down to the good marketing of the bait suppliers who extol the virtues of the frozen ones, thus more and more anglers are using them, and as we have already said, the more that are used the more the choice of what you personally use is taken away from you. If virtually everyone on the water is using frozen ones,(and throwing in unused extra ones), then probably to succeed you will have little choice but to follow. I do not believe that this is down to a fish preferring one to the other, it is simply that the majority of food on offer will become its dominant food source. You are now using a product that has a built in throw away factor which must be seen as good for the bait industry.