Give Your Boilies A Drink! Air-Drying and Rehydration Tips!
by Shaun Harrison
I guess it would raise a fair few eyebrows if I told you that I rarely use a conventional, freshly-frozen or preserved shelf life boilie. What is more, I can’t see myself using conventional boilies in the distant future either. All the boilie-type baits I use are air-dried then re-hydrated.
Why?
Because I get a lot more takes on them than I ever did on conventional baits!
Although I have messed around air-drying baits in the past I must admit, like a lot of anglers before me, it was simply to try and produce harder baits or to semi-preserve them on a longish session, rather than use preservatives that I don’t really understand.
It wasn’t until I joined the infamous video” target=”_blank”>Mangrove Syndicate in deepest Shropshire that I came up with an idea that I thought might just give me a bit of an edge over the other members. I was struggling. Yes, I was catching carp, but not as many as some of the other members. This is when my old grey matter usually starts to bubble away at its greatest capacity. I was racking my brains for an edge. It had been years since I had last fished such a silty lake. The whole of the lake bottom seemed to comprise deep silt in the clean areas or mega-deep silt in the other bits.
Confidence
As I didn’t know any of the mini hotspots that every lake has, I didn’t know if I had fished the right areas or the wrong areas of each swim. One thing that really got to me though, was constantly winding in baits that stank of silt. I know the carp aren’t particularly bothered, but I was. It wasn’t doing my confidence any good at all. I don’t follow the over flavoured, in-your-face route (although I have been known to use in-your-face coloured hook baits), and it was starting to get to me that my baits were becoming less detectable the longer they were sat waiting for a carp to find them. This was particularly worrying, as all of my fish had so far fallen on the second night of my usual 36-hour sessions.
Give Your Boilies A Drink
All boilies are dehydrated to a certain extent during the usual drying/cooling process. This is why they shrink a little when first taken out of the boiling water. Alternatively, if you don’t actually make your own baits, this is why the boilies swell up after being cast out for a period. They are simply drinking the water up and rehydrating themselves to full level. I had quite a few kilos of air dried boilies prepared for a forthcoming French trip. (check out the Angling Lines Blog for French info here) It had suddenly dawned upon me that I had done no experimentation to find out how much liquid and how much time I needed to convert my air-dried baits back to conventional-looking baits. So, with air-dried baits in three separate buckets I introduced three differing amounts of water from my pond. (I never use tap water for any part of my bait preparation be it cooking particles or simply soaking baits.) The following morning, the baits in bucket number one were still hard in the middle. Bucket number two looked no different than they had prior to being air-dried and, finally, bucket number three looked as though they had been on the lake bottom all day. I had overdone the water in these – or had I?
Soak It Up
Being a northerner, I am naturally tight. So, not wanting to waste these experimental baits, I took them along with me on my next Mangrove session. It was during the drive to the mere that my thoughts tuned into the waterlogged baits. Now, surely, if I were to force-feed my boilies into drinking as much liquid as possible before introducing them into the lake then surely they would be less able to take on the surrounding silt smell? The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Would more liquid in the bait alter their sinking rate as well? Would they sink faster or slower? My brain went into turmoil. I was right – my soaked baits took on very little silt smell. After returning from the session mentioned above I started to experiment by force-feeding my dehydrates with different liquids. As you would expect, the thicker the liquid, the longer it took to rehydrate the bait.
Hemp Talk
Now, everyone knows the effectiveness of hemp seed. Carp absolutely love the stuff. It is brilliant. I have definitely used more hemp over the years than any other bait. The problem is though, that it can be a little too good. Get the carp feeding on it heavy and it can become frustratingly difficult to encourage them to pick up a larger hook bait and move off fast enough to prick themselves.
Many companies have tried to cash in on this phenomenal bait but no-one has yet come up with anything that attracts like hemp itself. The various hemp mixes hemp oils, hemp flavours and so on – just don’t seem to live up to their names. Yet, if I pour the oily water from freshly-cooked hemp into my pond at home the carp seem to be instantly triggered into feeding mode.
Big Hitter
Naturally, one of the first liquids I experimented with on completely air dried baits was the water from a freshly-cooked batch of hemp. The results staggered me. I found that two pints of air-dried barrel shaped (10mm sausages rolled out on a 15mm table) boilies would drink one pint of hemp juice and still look and feel like a standard boilie. I simply knew they would work before I ever used them.
The next session was to turn into my most productive since joining the Mangrove!
What is more, I even caught on the first evening. I had only introduced the oversoaked baits the first evening and by the second evening I had made sure that I had presoaked the rest of my bait. With carp of 19lb, 29lb 12oz, 22lb 4oz, 32lb 7oz (Conan), 16lb, 25lb 4oz, 19lb 14oz and 24lb 12oz, as well as losing a fish, it had turned into quite a hectic session for me – nine chances in 36 hours on a new bait!
The hemp juice is still the most effective rehydrating liquid I have used. To be honest, it has been that good for me that I have hardly messed around with anything else.
Rehydrate
During the lead into winter that first year (pre-Christmas), I was still catching over big beds of bait. This was at a time when others were seemingly only getting takes over minimal bait. So, why do my dehydrated/rehydrated baits work more effectively for me than conventional baits and what conclusions have I come to after their continued use? I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one reason. I started off by simply trying to fill them with liquid so as to try and keep the silt smell/taste out. This in effect gives a bit of a washed-out texture. A lot of the unsafe baits carp come across are pretty dry in the middle. I have tried speeding the bait preparation process up by simply adding hemp liquid to conventional frozen boilies. Yes, they drink a little bit of the juice, but they don’t take on anywhere near as much as the do if air-dried first. These baits have caught fish for me but not in the same numbers or as consistent. The baits I have had the most success with were air-dried for a full 12 months, so bait life is not an issue here.
Texture
The softer I have made these baits, the better they have appeared to work. These days I completely water/hemplog my baits rather than try to revert them back to a conventional boilie. Ideally, I like to be able to squash my baits between thumb and forefinger easily. I guess nuisance species ought to be a nightmare on my soft, paste-like baits but they don’t appear to be. Yes, I catch the odd bream and will obviously struggle with a throwing stick. I use the spod, a bait rocket or a catapult. Many anglers air-dry baits for foreign sessions in order to be able to carry more bait and preserve them at the same time. Most then introduce them into the lake in an air-dried state. I have done exactly the same in the past and have caught carp remarkably quickly while doing so. The carp will crunch up air-dried baits. However, they will take an awful lot of lake water/smell into them, thus masking any flavour the bait may have once had. If you go to the trouble of rehydrating them first, even with just a little water and your chosen attractors, then I can assure you your baits will work more efficiently.
Afterthought
Dehydrating, then rehydrating your baits is also the perfect way of sinking heat-damaged flavours such as the ethyl alcohol-based ones into your bait. Lots of attractors are destroyed at the boiling stage, so why put them in? After all the plus points, I will end with a couple of bad points to watch out for. I’ve found that rehydrated boilies generally go sour/off much quicker than conventional bait. You don’t really want to be using them much more than 48 hours after rehydration. And finally, if left in liquid and in the sun, then they will start to float after a couple of days. Similarly, if boiling hemp water is used for rehydrating then the baits again sometimes float. I boil my hemp in the evening, then leave it to cool overnight and then I pour the liquid over the bait the following morning. Twelve hours later and they are ready to use. Give it a try, I did!
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Tags: angling, bait, carp, fishing, france, tackle, techniques, tips
Hi Shaun
A great piece of advice and one that I will certainly be giving more thought to. I am sure that little extra effort will put a lot of people off trying the idea, which will work to the advantage even more of those that do. I would be interested to hear of any variations of flavours/juices used for this. Have you tried the juice from Tigers or your Garlic Feast?.
Do you find specific times of the year are better for this approach?.
Have you had much success using this as single hookbaits or have you found it more productive fished as a large bed of bait?.
Cheers
Jamie
I used to go to France for 5 weeks at a time. Because I made my own boilies at the time & I didn’t want to add preservative I air dried them thoroughly (turning constantly in a warm room for 3 to 4 weeks - stunk the house out!) so that they would last the trip without going off.
The result was a rock hard boilie (I often had to use the boilie drill to get them on the hair) that had shrunk slightly but stayed OK for the whole trip providing I kept the damp off them. The fact they were rock hard was an added advantage if there were poisson chat or cray fish in the lake - so if that was the case I’d cast them out & use them as freebies un-rehydrated, letting the lake water do the job slowly.
But if I wanted to soften them slightly I’d pour about 10 to 20ml of fish oil over them in a bucket, swill it round & leave them for a couple of hours. Result was a lovelly oil coated boilie, still hard in the centre but the first couple of mm of skin were softer & no doubt more prone to breaking down in the water - not only leaking off oil but the boilie components too.
Worked very well for me.
Hi Jamie,
I have now used many different types of liquid in my re-hydration experiments but have yet to come up with anything which works better in the summer months than the juice from cooked hempseed.
I say the summer months as I found simple lake/pond water to be more consistant during the long cold months of winter. This would be used to soak the baits in 24 hours before fishing (dependant on the size of the bait).
This also gives the ’safe washed out’ look and texture. Give it a go with any bait, not just air dried baits. You could be in for a pleasant surprise
[...] baits, then you’ll need to either air-dry them, (check out Shaun’s excellent article on the Quest Baits site about Rehydration), if the venue doesn’t have freezer facilities, or take frozen and drop them in the freezer on [...]
[...] recommend Shaun’s approach of soaking them in hemp juice. You can see how to do this on the Quest website & Blog, as Shaun has written about it in his Carpworld articles. Alternatively you could take Questbait [...]
Hi Shaun,the hemp juice can it be kept for later use?, in fridge or can it be frozen. ive just made a few kilos of boilies and started air drying them and am going to cook some hemp [say 2 kilos] is there a certain amount of boiling water I need or as long as the hemp is covered by a few inchies…many thanks and tight lines…colin.
Hi Colin,
So sorry for the delay in answering - this one has been lost in the depths of my computer somewhere - don’t know how I have missed it!
Yes, I always used to freeze half pint and 1 pint bags of hemp juice. I pour the juice in a plain simply sandwhich bag, use a paper covered wire twist to seal the bag and freeze it.
If you try and freeze several pints in a block you will find it takes ages to thaw out.
Water wise when I was getting through quite a lot of re-hydrates on the Mangrove I would simply add twice as much to the hemp as normal, then bag the excess juice. By measuring it before freezing it life gets so much easier.
Hope this helps
Best fishes
Shaun
hi shaun many thanks sir , no problem i know your a very busy man. thanks again and tight lines…colin.
One of the methods I use to speed up the rehydration process is to use a pellet pump. The time varies depending on size but it works quite well.
[...] this is the original article that shaun wrote in carpworld m8 Rehydration of carp baits, how to prepare baits for session in France and the UK | Quest Baits Blog __________________ You Might Be A King Or An Old Street Sweeper;But Sooner Or Later,You Dance [...]
Great article Shaun…very useful
Just one point, do you concider the boilies safe after you had soaked them in your pond water? I was thinking in terms of introducing viruses into other lakes that may be present in your pond.
keep up the good work
Paul
This is a very important point Paul, I’m glad you have raised it.
I became paranoid about the risk of transferring diseases in the summer of 2007 when we had an outbreak of unexplained carp deaths around the Trent river system. Until then I had always used local lake and river water to cook my hemp in, then used that to rehydrate air dried boilies with. Now there’s no risk if the water has been thoroughly boiled but I tended to add extra (unboiled) water to the hemp juice and then use that liquid to rehydrate with.
I would therefore suggest any water that is used should always be boiled first, or better still, only use water from the lake you intend to fish. I now take home 5 litre bottles of lake water with me at the end of a session and use that to do all my particle preparation and rehydration with.
Elie G