Jim Kelly

I must admit I also need to think about using shelf life boilies again. They have improved beyond recognition from the early ‘preservative’ days and a number of Quest users have told me they have had great results on them.

Elie G

I use bread trays to air dry my baits they stack beautifully. I have some small gauge nylon mesh in the bottom; buy it from a garden centre. It is a good idea to rotate the trays every day as the top one dries quicker than the bottom. Keep the bottom tray off the floor with a couple of pieces of wood I dry mine in the conservatory. Only have a single layer of bait on each tray. The baits must be dried in a warm, dry place or they will fur up.

Air drying would have been my preferred method of keeping bait until last year when I tried Quest baits shelf life baits. These baits are excellent; they are nice and hard and can be used straight from the bag. Paul Cooper and I used them at Long Lake with fantastic results. They have caught consistently on the Mangrove. Have you thought about taking some fresh bait/air dried for the start of the week and some shelf life for the end of the week? This way you can bring home any bait you don’t use.

Jim Kelly

Well I can tell you that I have used air dried and rehydrated baits for several years now and hardy ever use fresh baits. I really believe it gives me an edge everywhere I fish with it.

DRYING: Preparing the baits couldn’t be simpler. You want the baits totally ‘marble’ dry. In the summer leave them on a towel in the sun during the day and then overnight in an air dry bag – you can get these bags from most tackle shops. Keep them drying for days if that’s how long it takes and jiggle them about to turn them – as long as they are dry and can breathe they won’t go off. In the winter put the towel with the baits in any centrally heated room – but be aware the whole house might smell of bait if you do it this way! I am so keen on the method I invested in an electric food drying rack system made by a company called L’Equip but you don’t have to do this. Another tip is everytime you have freezer bait left over from a session in the summer then air dry them and keep them for the future. You can take some fresh bait with you to Maurepaire in May – if it’s hot you can dry it out as you go along. I always have plenty of air dried bait kept in a large paper bag so I can use them as I need to.

REHYDRATING: I always rehydrate them the night before I want to use them. My favourite liquid is hemp water (from boiling hemp) mixed with a combination of Quest Bait Glug (to match the boilies) and bloodworm liquid or anchovy extract and honey. I have also used CSL and tiger nut liquid – most good food liquids will do. You can use lake water too but make sure you add food liquids to it as well. I add the boilies to the liquid in a bucket until there is still two to three inches of liquid above them. They will really swell up. They will be ready the next day. Keep them in the shade and they will last for a couple of days. When I’m on a longer session of a week then I get into a routine and prepare hemp each day and rehydrate the boilies in the liquid in the early evening for use the next day.

HOOKBAITS: Rehydrated boilies are too soft to use as hookbait. I use them as loose feed and then use a harder hook bait on top. The Quest hard hookbaits are perfect for this.

Hope that helps. Any further queries just ask.

Good luck in Maurepaire, let us know how you get on.

Best fishes

Elie G.

Around 10 years ago I used to go to France for 6 weeks at a time. I made my own baits at the time so using preservative wasn’t an option I wanted to persue. Like you I had no access to freezers so I had to find a way to be able to take my precious “home mades”. Here’s the process I used;

I air dried them for around 3 weeks prior to going. I used the small mesh plastic trellis type material gardners use (approx. 5mm mesh size) tacked to a softwood frame. This was around 1.5m square & I used 3 of them. I supportedthem off the ground in my garage and kept turning the baits daily. A fairly labourious process but the end result was baits that were completely dried out & rock hard.

I then packed them into relatively small card board boxes holding around 3kg (not too many to a box in case a box did get damp). When in France I was very careful to keep them dry – keeping the damp away is the key. I’d take a couple of boxes out at a time & keep them in the carp sacks hung from trees, or on hot days spread out on the ground.

I’d rehydrate around 3kg at a time – my rehydration method was to pour around 30ml of Salmon oil over a bowl full of boilies and shake them around. 30 seconds shaking & they’d be liberally coated and over the next few hours this would soak in. An added advantage of having hard dehydrated boilies is that they deter crayfish & Poisson Chat attack too.

So there you have it – I give you my word that I happily fished for 6 weeks using boilies with not a drop of preservative in them.

However…. would I do it now? Not on your life! I’d just use the shelflifes, I really would… but at the time I didn’t have confidence in them (& probably rightly so back then) so it was worth the effort.

Good luck at maurepaire!