| MARK WINTLE | |
Shaun has caught some huge carp from both the UK and abroad. |
| Now I guess this may surprise a few anglers, after all, I run a bait company and here I am advocating artificial bait, but anyone who has read my work over the years will have realised by now that I tell it how it is. I see no point in pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes. I could sit here saying that plastic and artificial baits are the worst thing ever to happen to the carp scene, but I would be lying. Not only that, but there will be more than a few of you who have been present when I have wound in and seen bits of plastic on my rigs so any credibility I may have had would then be down the pan.
I have spent too many years getting to this stage in life to start having to worry about getting caught out. The simple fact of the matter is that I have used a lot of different artificial hookbaits and, to my mind, they have many advantages over the most carefully prepared natural bait. By natural bait, I am, of course, referring to real food items, because a boilie can hardly be described as natural. Before we move on any further I guess I should clarify what I am writing about here.
Many anglers seem quite happy with the artificial corn which is now available in a few different guises from more than one company, although we really have Enterprise Tackle to thank for bringing the artificial baits to the fore. Now perhaps the second surprise in this piece is that I rarely use the artificial corn myself – much preferring the artificial boilies which Enterprise supply, but I know from the years I spent behind the counter at Walkers of Trowell that most anglers have no confidence in them at all – we used to sell loads of the artificial sweetcorn but hardly any of the boilies. This, from a selfish point of view, suited me fine as I feel that the boilies are much more effective – and very different. It’s not just the plastic artificial baits I have done well with. Once I realised the potential of some of these baits I started to explore further. I now regularly use polystyrene balls, float tops, painted balsa, small rubber balls sold for fly-tying, bits from toys – all sorts of things as sight bobs in preference to my conventional baits. Artificial Advantages1. They stay on forever no matter how much casting is done: I have seen concerns raised regarding the dangers of carp swallowing bits of plastic. This is a fair point and one with which we should concern ourselves, but, and it is a big BUT, I, more than most, have used various artificial baits and I can honestly say I don’t lose any off the hair. I did have a few strange occurrences in France before I realised that crayfish were pulling the hair stops out, but that was soon sorted by making a larger loop on the hair, thus lengthening the hair, then threading through the bait in the conventional manner and looping the hair around the bait and passing the hooklink through the hair loop. Emergency measures, but it sorted the problem. Frequent casting with conventional baits often requires frequent changing of hookbaits, which can then mean a lot of wasted time rebalancing rigs. If a fish shows and you feel it warrants a cast, you can wind in a bait which has been out for two days and recast immediately to the showing fish. There are very few ‘proper food baits’, with which you can do this. More time fishing – less time messing around. 2. They seem pretty immune to nuisance fish attack: Like it or not, most of the so-called nuisance species seem much more capable than carp of realising that an artificial bait is non-edible. I know we like to think of the carp as being intelligent, but, if truth be known, they are big daft things at times. Large items of food are a different prospect. I found it so frustrating right from the start of the very first Korda Underwater DVD that large hookbaits were continually put in amongst tiny particles. A piece of cork counterbalancing a bare hook would have surprised a few people. Again, get the fish feeding and the vacuum created in sucking up small food items will ensure most small, light baits will go in. I digressed a little there, but the fact is, I get much less nuisance fish activity whilst using artificial baits. This means fewer messed up rigs and less chance of the hook picking up bottom debris as the bait is subjected to a game of blow football.
3. Their colour doesn’t fade when left in the water: Not an awful lot to elaborate upon here. Most baits come back looking much more washed out than when we first cast them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – except if you want a bright bait! 4. The commercially available ones will take on whatever flavour we want them to take on: I have used flavoured and unflavoured artificial baits over the years. I always used to feel more confident with flavoured ones, but these days I tend to not bother flavouring them. This allows me to use different flavoured bottom baits underneath them without the need to carry lots of variations. Certainly, once flavoured I have found it impossible to get rid of the flavour but maybe someone can point me in the right direction? So, what is the difference between a boosted flavour natural bait and a flavoured artificial bait? I guess with most things the flavour washes straight off, but with artificial baits it doesn’t. 5. You don’t need potfuls of the things to get results: This is one of the major attractions for me and reason enough to continue to utilise artificial hookbaits. I have always messed around with alternative hookbaits. It’s rare for me to try to match the hookbait to what I am feeding as a free bait. It is so difficult to match them exactly once on a rig, with the weight of the hook, and the drag of the hooklink, etc, that I rarely bother to try to simulate, much preferring to offer something totally different. I also believe you are less likely to put carp off a certain bait by tripping them up on an alternative – worth bearing in mind if you are trying to establish a bait. Believe me, the more you get fish onto a bait the less important your hookbait is. Once you get them feeding hard they will slip up. I can, and do, carry a vast range of alternative colours, sizes, and types of hookbait all in a few tiny pots. With natural bait you have to carry so much bulk because you need to cater for each cast, lost bait, etc, etc. Yes, give me a few film canisters of artificial baits to carry around any day, rather than a separate hookbait bag.
Different PresentationsWell, there we have the first five main points out of the way. For this section I am mostly going to be talking about artificial boilies or artificial items that can be loosely passed off as boilies. I have mentioned that the brightly coloured artificial baits are excellent when used as single hookbait presentations, but this isn’t the only way I use them – or, in fact, the main way I use them. More often than not I like to cap natural baits with an artificial sight bob. As I have said so many times in the past – I purposely make my hookbaits different to the loose feed, and not necessarily brighter. I often use very drab colours. A small, dark, discreet bait is often more likely to be taken than a bright ‘in your face’ bait. It is a case of ringing the changes and finding what type of bait they want on the day. By carrying a selection of different colours you can keep swapping and changing the top bait until you find what the fish in your water prefer. This, you may be surprised to hear, can change at different times of the day. The angler sitting with the same hookbait day in, day out, never gets those bonus chances. I find it so very strange that you can take a carp angler maggot fishing and he/she will be more than happy to keep trying different colours or alternative baits knowing that they induce a few more bites, yet give most of them a bag of boilies and they want every bait to be the same. Weird! The obvious way, and the one which most anglers use, is a simple Snowman setup with a full artificial over a full natural bait. This has caught me so many fish over the years that it’s a wonder I ever bothered to experiment further, but I get bored using the same methods and the same baits week in, week out; I need to swap and change to keep my interest. A particularly successful method I use, especially in the cooler water conditions of late autumn through to early spring, is half a proper boilie and half an Enterprise Tackle boilie. This gives an open side of a natural bait to seep out some subtle attraction, and half an artificial to give some visual attraction. The Enterprise boilies are very easy to cut in half with a sharp knife. Similarly, they can be made whatever shape you desire. This hookbait of two halves method will give another lease of life to your take rate once the carp start to suss out, and shy away from, the more commonly used Snowman presentations. I would be totally lost without the Enterprise artificial boilies in my own fishing, but there are times I require a bait, or a top bait, a little more buoyant than the buoyant plastic boilies. I then turn to painted polystyrene balls. I stumbled across these originally in a sea fishing shop. I learned, whilst working at Walkers of Trowell, that there were some very interesting things available to the sea angler and the game angler, which were incredibly useful in a carp angler’s armoury. Lots of things have been available for years but only in more recent times have carp anglers realised some of the potential of these things. Leadcore, fluorocarbon lines, quick-release rig clips, line counters, blunt ended flying backleads (lure nose cones) and many of the hook patterns we now use, to name but a few, have been around for years and years, it’s just that we carp anglers don’t tend to go looking in other areas of the sport, instead, most of us wait for other people to discover them. Personally, I can’t help myself. I would much rather go looking at sea fishing tackle or game angling gear than spend time looking at carp tackle. I have picked up some real gems over the years from the most unlikely of shops. Back to these polystyrene balls. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were packs of all different sizes, from tiny ones of 3 or 4mm up to around 12mm. These polystyrene balls, I guess, were sold for making anti-crab-type rigs for flounder, etc, so were pre-drilled. Each pack contained three colours, Blaze Orange, Fire Orange and Saturn Yellow – the three most commonly used float top paints. I quickly parted with a bit of my hard-earned (and it was only a bit) for handfuls of the things. I remember thinking at the time that if one of the carp-related companies got hold of them they would charge a fortune for them. I caught from the start on these, fished above conventional baits. The two orange colours have been the most successful for me, although I have caught on the yellow. I never fish anywhere without a small mixed pot of these mixed colour, mixed-size polystyrene balls in my kit. When you want a small, bright hookbait they don’t come much brighter than these!
Another very useful find were some small buoyant rubber balls sold in the fly-tying world. These are used for tying lures with buoyant heads. A vast range of colours and variations on sizes are available and with these you can get some nice drab-coloured ones. These rubber balls tend to be quite soft to the touch and take on a flavour incredibly well. I was on the Mangrove the first time I put on one of these. It was February and a gale was blowing from right to left, making it impossible to get a bait out to where I had been catching a few fish on previous visits. It was so frustrating and I was racking my brains for what to do. The wind simply didn’t drop for long enough to get a cast in. I needed a smaller bait with less air drag. Then I remembered these tiny rubber balls which I had purchased for another situation. They were small 4mm and 6mm ones in an old 35mm film canister soaking away in flavour. Like a lot of things, I had brought them but had never got around to using them. I tied up a fresh rig with a shorter hair and smaller hook to accommodate just one of these tiny baits. Out from the shelter of my umbrella I prepared to cast and gave it the big one. For the first time that day my marker knot left the reel and the bait was bang on the money – so to speak. Not being particularly confident of a single 4mm artificial bait cast in the middle of nowhere, I was slightly taken aback when a drop back occurred on that rod around an hour after casting. I wound down and, sure enough, a carp was on the end. I played it very carefully to the margins and up popped a 30! Soon it was in the net. A 30lb+ February mirror on a single, relatively tiny, artificial bait with absolutely no freebies out there at all (I couldn’t reach to put any out, and it was too rough to even contemplate taking out a boat, and I had been the only one fishing there). Big lesson learned again. It is more important where you put a bait, rather than what you actually offer. I have since caught a few fish doing this, but you need to be really confident that you have your location bang-on. The Renowned Artificial Sweetcorn Partridge Tackle were the first company I was aware of to distribute this, but the three I most often see on offer are the ones from Enterprise Tackle, and Alien Baits, and the Korum ones from Preston Innovations, although lots of other companies seem to be jumping on the bandwagon too. I have used all the ones mentioned and all behave in a slightly different way with different buoyancies and very different textures. For a while there were only buoyant versions available, which limited presentation possibilities a little. The first small yellow versions were so popular that soon many other colours were released and eventually sinking versions too. In fact, there are now so many variations on the humble grain of corn that it would take a lifetime to try all the variations and come to any worthwhile conclusions as to the ones best used in differing situations. At least now, with so many variations, it is going to take much longer for certain ones to blow as everyone who is confident enough to use them will be messing around with their own favourites, rather than the same one all the time. The introduction of the plastic corn has certainly helped revolutionise maize fishing. It still amazes me that you can look into a bucketful of maize, thousands of separate grains, but you struggle to find one suitable for the rig – yet you expect the carp to eat every single grain in the bucket. Aren’t we strange creatures? A surprising method which catches a lot of carp is a small artificial grain of sweetcorn fished on top of a boilie. I guess it can act as a bit of a sight bob, but, more often than not, the grain of corn isn’t large enough, therefore not buoyant enough, to actually end up sitting on top of the boilie. Unless you use particularly small, light boilies, the chances are your piece of corn is going to be sitting at the side of your boilie. Yet another instance of rigs behaving differently to some of those illustrated in the magazines. Other Artificial BaitsYou name it, you can now buy it. Artificial maggots, casters, worms, bloodworm, bread, pellets, peanuts, tiger nuts, whole maize, flaked maize, hempseed, Chum Mixer, the list goes on, with new products appearing all the time. I have never had it so good. I had plenty to experiment with anyway from outside the usual suppliers, lots of beads and everything else, but now I am less likely to get competition from others who will probably be satisfied with the items made available in carp fishing shops.
If you haven’t yet plucked up the courage to sit behind rods with artificial baits on the end you really are missing out on something. If you aren’t confident enough to fish the baits on their own, get the carp feeding well on proper bait and you may be surprised how many more takes you receive on a small artificial bait than a proper bait. Fish two baits side by side and see for yourself. I think it was Bernard Loftus who came up with the Mag-Aligner and Rob Maylin brought it to everyone’s attention after first milking the method himself. Artificial baits aren’t just for young, na  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which supports our community.
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