by Elie Godsi;
In my opinion there is no better way of achieving both attraction and a feeding response than using carefully prepared groundbait – or ‘carpet feed’ as it seems to get called these days.
This is a completely different scenario to what I see the vast majority of anglers doing. I still loose feed boilies and fish with boilies as hookbaits as usual – but I believe baiting up with groundbait as well gives me a massive edge.
I guess many of us are lazy by inclination, if you offer us an easy option then we tend to take it and nowhere is this more obvious in the way many people approach baiting up.
Take a bag of boilies with you, shelf-life or frozen, out goes the marker float, out go the freebies with a catapult and out goes the rig. Buzzers on, you sit back, maybe open a can of liquid refreshment and wait.
Sounds familiar?
But this is a baiting scenario carp are presented with time and time again. Hey, don’t get me wrong I’ve done this too and I’ve caught but I’ll tell you one thing for definite, if you can be bothered to make the effort and work harder at baiting up and being different to everyone else you will catch much more and you will catch bigger fish too.
I talk about how I use groundbait in detail in my video interviews on the Quest website. Everywhere I’ve used it my groundbait ‘recipe’ has caught me loads of fish and plenty of big fish too. This is what to do – sorry, none of the amounts I use are precise or measured – this is fishing not blooming Jamie Oliver!
- Put 3 or 4 pints of cooked hempseed in a bucket.
- Add a tin of sweetcorn with its water.
- About a quarter of a pint of dead (from frozen) maggots.
- A ‘hand sized’ block of (now defrosted) frozen bloodworm.
- Pour on some Quest Baits Bait Glug to match the boilies you’re using.
- Add some honey.
- Some salt
- Some bloodworm liquid.
- Whatever else you want.
The whole lot should be really sloppy and wet at this point. Mix it well (I use a cheap plastic garden trowel).
Now add Quest Baits Maximum Action Pellets (mostly to match the boilies you are using but I always add some Rhaja Spice Pellets as well to ‘spice’ it up).
Mix it all up and leave it overnight.
The amount of dry pellets you add is a matter of practice: it still needs to look wet when the pellets go in as they will soak up all the liquid overnight.
The next day I check the consistency and mix it all again to put some ‘air’ into it. Too wet – add some more pellets, too dry – add a bit more liquid.
It should bind when you try to squeeze it or roll it into balls – if the consistency is right you should be left with a thin sticky coating on your hands. The mix should be a bit too soft to be used as a method mix but tough enough to withstand being catapulted out.
When I arrive to fish one of the first things I do is prepare some groundbait balls on the bank. At this stage I add some crumbled up (rehydrated or fresh) boilies so there are half and quarter sized boilies in the mix.
The groundbait balls need to be about the size of tangerines (satsumas) so they will fit snuggly into a purpose made groundbait catapult – the ones with a plastic cup at the end of the elastic.
I roll as many as I need and leave them to dry out in the air for a few minutes or more – if it’s sunny that’s perfect – a dry crust on the outside will make the balls easier to catapult. I catapult boilies around the marker float and then about a dozen or so groundbait balls loosely around the area.
I don’t want anything too tightly grouped as this way the fish have a much bigger area of attraction to come across and I want them to move from bait to bait – I’m convinced you get better runs that way. I also tend to bait up a little bit beyond where the marker float is so that there are no fishing lines running through the baited patch along the lake bed.
There are so many advantages to this method.
For a start, that clever Mr Harrison has made the Maximum Action Pellets from an identical base mix as the boilies are made of – think of all that attraction being given off with exactly the same food signals as your hookbaits!
With so many different ingredients the carp are almost certain to find something they want to eat and this will encourage them to feed confidently. Lots of smaller fish feeding on the tiny particles will attract the carp that then home in on the bigger bits of bait – when the larger fish start to root around, the groundbait on the bottom gives off a cloud of attraction that has to be seen to be believed.
Importantly, there are so many different sizes, shapes and buoyancy of bait the carp will find it much harder to work out which one is attached to a hook and hooklink. This is also a much more subtle way of introducing particles without a noisy spod thrashing around – some of the balls should explode on impact creating a very similar cloudy effect.
It may sound like a lot of hard work compared to just using boilies out the bag. But if you are prepared to put in the effort and do something different from everyone else I am sure you will be rewarded in the same way as I have been using this fantastic method.
Elie G
:)
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