The Baits & Flavours Column

He is affectionately known as Dave the Flave due to his love affair with baits and flavours and is a self-confessed flavour junky.

PART 1 – BOILIE BASICS – FROM DRY INGREDIENTS TO PASTE

Boilies, surely the most convenient bait devised for angling? ButI sometimes wonder if the sheer success and convenience of thesebaits can actually pose problems to anglers who start using them forthe first time.

Their first approach to a tackle shop in search of these will be adaunting one as they survey rows and rows of coloured baits withextravagant and mystic names, such as Assasin8, Activ8, Multiplex andthe Isotonic range to name just a few of the multitude available. Nowall of these baits are extremely effective and catch thousands offish each year, but I feel that the high success rates of themactually means the new angler can lose out on a valuable aspect ofangling; that desire to know why and how their baits work.

I still find this part of fishing such a challenge and a veryenjoyable one at that and a lot of new anglers don’t even think aboutit. To be honest they don’t need to know, but I feel they miss out onthe element of experimentation that most anglers with a few yearsunder their belts still seem to relish.

Let me try to clarify this a bit more so as not to sound oldfashioned, set in my ways or even out of touch. With the multitude ofreadymade boilies available just about everywhere I personally feelit has taken a lot of the learning curve away from anglers who, beingnew to the sport, can theoretically approach a water and ask variousanglers what’s working. And then trot off to the shop to buy some,return and put the same bait on both rods and sit back to await thefish.

Now there are most likely a lot of you shaking your heads at mylast statement and thinking, ‘but surely the idea is to go to a waterwith the right bait!’ But I cannot remember how many new anglers,young and not so young, I have met bankside that have come for a chatand been so downhearted that they did not arrive with THE bait! Theywere defeated before they had put a line in the water and theirenthusiasm had gone. Even the offer of some flavoured luncheon meator paste that I had been catching on did not re-light their fuse.They just had no faith in it. I am also dismayed at the number ofyoung anglers who take up carp fishing as their first approach tofishing and have never used anything else but boilies!

I am not anti-boilie in any way (I’d hardly be writing thisarticle if I was, would I?). I always carry a small selectionwhenever I am lake fishing as so many species have become accustomedto eating them on a daily basis. And there has been many a time thatI have used a certain boilie on one rod and had take after take withnot a touch on the boilie on the other rod. So yes, I have put themon both rods; it stands to reason we are there to catch fish but I atleast had the choice of other baits.

As often mentioned in previous articles both my family and petssuffer great loss at times for my love of bait making, there is verylittle that comes into the house that does not get the once-overafter it has hit the cupboard.

Think back. Who amongst you hasn’t pinched the cat’s biscuits andput them through the grinder when ‘she who must be obeyed’ has goneout. Or nicked the custard powder and the milkshake powders.Devastating! This is what I mean about the learning curve. I rememberyears ago taking boilies made up of trout pellet, an Oxo cube andground cat biscuits, and after a successful trip thinking I had THEmagic bait only to open the bait box before the next trip to find furballs that resembled the offspring of Gizmo! Obviously I had a lot tolearn about preservatives, but learn I did and I continue to doso.

This was when the majority of ‘specialist’ baits came from thehome cupboard and allowed an endless scope for experimentation.

Anglers wanting to make up their own boilies without having to goin-depth on the various base ingredients need look no further thanthe shelves of their local tackle shop. There are some very effectivebase mixes out there to choose from and this allows you to make upyour own boilies with just the addition of your own ‘special’additives.

Making your own baits this way allows you to use a mix based onthe ‘working’ bait on your chosen water and experiment with flavourand attractor combinations, shapes and sizes to make the bait evenmore effective over a longer period of time.

This can be very rewarding and can give a great deal of enjoymentto the angler. Making your own baits should save a few pounds alongthe way too.

Another problem the newcomer to boilie making may come across isthe cost of some of the various ingredients. Having read or been tolda few recipes they go off to their tackle shop armed with a shoppinglist and then find that the bottle of X is £ 12 and the tub of XXis £ 9.99, plus the bottle of MultiXX is £ 14.99. And theyhaven’t even looked at the rows of base mixes yet. So quite oftentheir bait making ideas are short lived. Although, once purchased,many of these tubs and bottles often work out very economical.

So let’s have a look at the various stages of making boilies,beginning with a few ideas about making up the boilie paste, andthen, in Part 2 next week, some hints on freezing, storage andpreserving, including a couple of basic recipes. These can be madewithout a multitude of additives so therefore they won’t cost theEarth.

MAKING THE