Quest Baits Blog

Words and pictures by Pat Gillett:

I have just got back from a week’s social in France with my non-fishing kid brother David. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about fishing in France. I was his gillie for the week, finding clear spots, placing the baits etc. I must have done a decent job has by Tuesday he was already asking me ‘where are we going next year?’

We travelled down on the Friday and stopped in a lovely little campsite right by the side of the River Marne in Epernay. It was obvious from the brown colour and the height of the river that France had, had a very wet spring like the one we have just had. This became even more apparent when we got to the lake and found that the water level was actually coming over the front of the stagings.

The lake was very weedy at our end and was very much uniform in depth ranging from 7 1/2 feet to 9 feet in depth. It had steep margins that just fell straight off to about 8 feet. On arrival I spent a couple of hours leading about and marking the lines for the first night. Whenever I get to a new water I never put much bait in on the first night and this was to be no different has I put no more than 40 boilies over any of the rods. I put 2 rods each in open water and one rod each to the far margin at the bottom of the shelf. Baits were a mixture of the Quest Rahja Spice and Magnum White Boilies. The first night produced 2 upper doubles to my far margin rod but nothing to any of the other rods. continue reading…

Message:

Hi all,

I started making my own boilies, but a bit confused at to which flavours to use at which time of year,1 person told me fish flavours in winter and frutti in summer, then someone else told me the opposite. Any suggestions welcome

thanks all

Mike

Shaun Harrison answered:

Hi Mike,

The actual flavour has little bearing on the time of season to use it as most flavours are man made synthetics which don’t really alter the bait.

The important thing and the deciding factor is the base ingredients – the actual food content.

Basically you want to be avoiding anything that is oily during the colder months as these will congeal and trap in any attractive leakage they may have had and also make digestion of the said very difficult.

I designed all of the Quest Baits range to be effective and safe to use for 12 months of the year with the exception of Special Crab which does have quite a high oil content – this one really comes into its own during the warmest periods of the year.

The baits which have been truly outstanding during the colder months have been Fruity Trifle, Rahja Spice and Magnum White.

Hope this helps – the base ingredients are what make the difference – not the flavours they are labelled with – most artificial flavours smell of something but don’t taste of it.

Regards
Shaun Harrison