Nash Tackle - Pre Baiting - The Real Deal

Pre Baiting - The Real Deal - Julian Cundiff

Julian Cundiff | 2010-07-29

As I type this late afternoon in mid July summer is defiantly upon us with gasp / horror red hot days sometimes even up here in the ‘frozen north’. Hopefully you have all been getting out on the bank and catching your share, or if you’ve been lucky somebody else’s share. There are still plenty of good months to go and providing you can keep your head screwed on your catch rate should get better and better.. So lets now look at the second part of my views on baiting a water which will take us up to autumn where part three will kick in. Yes, you read it right… autumn. It isn’t that far away and if you don’t get your butt out of that chair, get back on the bank and start fishing you will wonder what on earth happened to 2010.….

1 - Don’t mess with the bait. You started the year on a bait and if you have been baiting with it that is what you must continue to put in not withstanding the fact that you may well be catching them on alternative baits at times. A lot of anglers make the mistake of applying a bait at the start of the year and when water temperatures rise and there are days that seem dead they change the bait. A little bit more of this and a little bit less of that. A different colour, maybe a different attractor combination. No NO NO…How else can I put it. If you are baiting a water to get them feeding so confidently on your food source that they start to act silly with it then changing it is going to work against you rather than for you in the long run. Sure you will catch fish but all the hard work you put in during April to July will be undone as you feed something different in until you inevitably get bored with that too. On one of my local syndicate waters one bait company is doing bait very cheaply for a number of the anglers and good for them ( and for the fish that got tons shovelled in ) I know that from talking to many of them that although they were all ‘originally’ on the same base mix and same attractors many are now on the same bases mix but different attractors. Ones they like. So all of a sudden that ‘common food source’ is not so common and from my observations its dominance has ended and they are undoing their own good work. Not that I mind……. 2 - On the same theme there is nothing wrong with using different hook baits providing you still continue to apply the same feed on the same regular basis. A month ago I was catching a lot of my fish on floaters and zigs yet I still kept putting the same boiley mix in because I knew they were eating it and it would benefit me in the long run. The last week or so with high water temperatures I have been catching a lot of fish fishing a high attract bait ( usually a pop up ) over plenty of my standard base mix. Sometimes it is a Pineapple and sometimes a White Chocolate hook bait but the bulk feed is my standard boily mix. That is what makes them root round on the bottom, clouding the water and throwing caution to the wind and being unable to resist that hi-attract hook bait. Had I not fed in the standard feed I am sure they would not even have dipped down….. 3 - So keep it going in as often as you can. it’s the holiday season for many of you and for anyone with a life ( sadly many of the well known carp anglers don’t seem to have one outside of the lake ) there’re are parties, barbeques, the family, motor sport, holidays, days out and the like so that the amount of hours you can put in may well be reduced. That’s okay providing the feed still goes in. In fact as long as the feed goes in and you are not hooking them it can only get better and better. I tend to do overnighters where I don‘t overdo it with feed when fishing but it goes in as I leave providing it does not affect others. Even if I can’t fish I will still find a way to get it in. Take this weekend. Usually I fish Sunday nights but because we are at a barbeque tonight, taking dad out tomorrow and want to still see the F1 and MotoGP Sunday night is out for fishing but I know that Sunday evening before I sit down with the F1 Sky + ’d I will have been down to the lakes and used the catapult and throwing stick to feed it out. Yes its hard work but being successful particularly on a consistent basis does take hard work. If it wasn’t hard work more would do it. So whether you are BBQ ing or on the pull if you want the baiting up to work you have to keep sticking it in if you excuse the pun. 4 - Carp will still be very mobile so don’t try to concentrate all your efforts into one area but instead put it where the carp are or where you think they are. Its summer so they should be making their presence known so climb them trees and keep looking in. If I am fishing I tend to bait the area I am in when I leave if carp are present but if I have messed up that night I will look in the morning to put bait where they are providing it is not going to upset other anglers. It may mean winding in a little earlier but you have got to look at the big picture not just the day you are there. 5 - If you can try to make your prebaits ’bigger and less round’ if that makes sense…. The bigger the bait the less chance the bream and tench will murder it and even if I use smaller baits to fish with when I am ordering my bait to be rolled a good % of it will be larger than what I fish with. So I may have a freezer half full of 18-22 mm boilies but hook bait’s a lot smaller. If I think the carp are wising up to my smaller baits I sometimes use a larger ‘prebait’ on the hair and it catches me a lot of carp year in year out. Round baits are great for catapulting at distance but if your water has any bottom weed they tend to find their way through it which isn’t exactly ideal. I like a good percentage of my baits to be chops and a chopped bait say 22mm in size will still catapult a long way with accuracy yet sit on the weed beautifully. Drop a handful of baits in the edge and see how ‘chops’ and round baits behave. I combine the two when fishing so the chops get the carp visually excited and once they see them and start tearing up that weed there are plenty of round ones down below 6 - Unless you are baiting up by hand it is important that the bait goes where you want it to with some degree of accuracy. The throwing stick is ideal for getting bait out at range and for scattering it to. Don’t forget the Cobra Spoon range that Nash do either. These are absolutely fantastic for getting lots of bait in very quickly and using either the standard or long range handle you can get those prebaits out and not be too late to work. Catapults are great too and I use the large pouches that the Tackle Box in Kent sell ( Scruffy Bob green ones ) as these allow me to get a huge number of baits out in one go. Change the elastics regularly and although accuracy is not vital what is vital is that the feed goes where you want it to. Spods are great too and give them a jerk as they hit the surface just to spread it a little. So there you have six more tips to take you through to the all important autumn period which I will cover in part three. Once you get to autumn you can start to ’lock’ the carp into certain areas of the lake as their natural food larder decreases and the baiting up you have been doing starts to reap BIG results. However what you don’t do now will cost you dear then. You can’t beat a year round campaign as I will show you…. By the time Part 3 is done my new book ’CARP: Short Session Success’ will have been released and for all you Nash fans out there you will find plenty to excite you. 60,000 words long and full colour I do cover everything you need to do if you fishing is restricted to one to thirty six hours but you still want to catch just as many. There are chapters on baiting up and how to do it accurately and effectively so if this has whetted you appetite…. The book will reveal all you need and I guarantee that once you have read it your results will improve. The book is out at the end of August and will be published by Angling Publications at just £14.99 with some hard back versions available too. Hopefully Kevin himself will do a review for me on the Nash site\so stay tuned and look for it at www.anglingpublications.co.uk See you soon Julian Cundiff