Boilies for river carp

[Howard 13]

Hi all,

 

With the 16th just around the corner I have been sorting out all my carp gear ready for the off, relining spools etc etc.

 

This will be my 3rd 'serious' river carp season and I'm looking for a bit of advice on which boilies might work better on 'untrained' fish.

 

My first season I used Scopex and had 2 twenty+ fish but last season I used Maple8's and didn't get one single bleep. The carp I did have last year again came on Scopex.

 

I haven't been to a tackle shop since last summer so don't know about any new ranges/flavours available. Is there anything new about similar to scopex that'd worth a try?

 

Cheers.

HB.

[*Ant*]

Strange HB, I'd have thought it would be visa-versa. My gut reaction would be to use a fishmeal based food boilie.

 

Dynamite Baits have 2 new boilie flavours out, a halibut and a tiger nut boilie. Haven't tried them myself but 2 of my fishing mates have done ok on the tiger nut.

Think i'd be tempted to fish with the halibut over a bed of halibut pellets, or even fish with a hair-rigged halibut pellet.

[jeepster]

the new tiger nut bolies are very good, not just for carp, i'll be trying them on the river very very soon

[Howard 13]

What are the tiger nut boilies - fresh or packaged?

 

HB.

[Julian]

Hi Mate,

 

People may say I’m biased (and let them!) but you could do a lot worse than giving Essential Baits Shellfish B5 a go. It contains various marine extracts, fishmeals and soluble fish & milk proteins. It also contains high levels of crustacean extracts which mimic the carps natural diet and add that crunch factor, the same thing they are used to when eating snails, mussels, etc. It also contains Fruit Factor 6, which gives the bait a sweet taste, so could be ideal if they have shown a liking for Scopex.

 

I have to be honest and say that it’s the best bait I’ve come across to date, and the proof is that since I started using it – most of my mates are now on it too, purely down to the amount of fish it takes. I’ve recently been doing a bit on a *massive* water that has never really seen a boilie. It’s a few miles long with about 100 carp, so we thought it would take a good while to get some results on ‘untrained fish’. As such we opted for naturals on half the rods and B5 on the others – we were gob smacked when we took 3 fish during the first night. All came to the B5 rods, not a bleep on the naturals!

 

I’m not saying that if you go out and get some you are immediately going to bank a monster, but I reckon you need to establish a quality food source that they can’t resist. They may show initial interest in a crap bait but will soon wise up to the fact that they are getting very little, if any, nutritional value from continued eating and will often leave well alone, and for me, despite the hype, a good deal of the best branded baits on the market still fall into that category.

 

Pre-baiting will also help, not sure how near/far the river is but we have found that by keeping a constant trickle going in to several spots (on several waters!) that they almost come to accept the bait as a ‘given’ bait for providing high nutritional value.

 

Julian

[jeepster]

the tiger nut ones are packaged

[Howard 13]

Thanks for the replies - anywhere I can order online? (B5's and tigernuts)

 

HB.

[Howard 13]

Just got back from a walk with my dogs by the river and there were a few carp/bream spawning in the reeds.

 

How long do carp stay in their spawning area after they've done their business?

 

HB.

[Peter Sharpe]

I honestly don't think it makes a great deal of difference what boilie you use on the rivers. As long as it isn't some kind of appalling rubbish you should do ok. Unless you have recently won the lottery I wouldn't advise bothering with expensive HNVs, as the chub and bream will scoff as many as you can possibly introduce. I've temporarily stopped using boilies altogether, because I've found an extremely low cost alternative that easily matches them. The only conclusion I've ever been able make is that after a long trial fishing both types, Trigga comfortably outfishes The Source. I had high hopes for The Source because there seemed to be something just right about the smell. I still caught plenty of fish on them but I always had a sneaking feeling that they were slightly inferior to other baits I had used. There are always too many variables to be absolutely certain though, and I'm convinced that in most cases the fish will simply eat what they find in front of them. Active-8 and Assassin-8 both worked well, but so did the strawberry ones that I started out with. I wouldn't get too hung up about it.

[Dick Dastardly]

All of my river carping is carried out with maize or trout pellet boillies over pellets.