I never loved ready made baits. But eventually the need of big quantities of boilies for massive baitings forced me to go for some ready made boilie. Right at the beginning I was really sceptical and I took with me a large quantity of self made baits, then, after some time, I started to appreciate and to prefer the ready made ones, cause they are really…easy and fast.
This slow but constant evolution allowed me to catch really big carps, teaching me the real potential of ready made baits. To be honest you cannot compare a ready made to a self made boilie. But viceversa too. Both have different potentials.
The process that takes me to choose between a ready made or a self made boilie has been very long and rich of tests. And I need to point out that every choice I did has been based on the lakes and rivers I fished, of course. Also the time dedicated that I have for a single session is influencing this choice. And in the end most of the times, now, I use ready made boilies.
But I want now to speak of a solution I successfully adopted to face long term challenging situations. In these situations I needed to use an over performing boilie that could slightly stand out the surrounding baiting boilies. “Slightly stand out” is a solution that I prefer when big spooky carps can become even more suspicious finding a too strong scented or too dipped boilie; so the concept is to have an over performing boilie but still very similar to all others. In this way the carp will be attracted but not alarmed. This solution is perfect if you use on your hook a fresh and soft self made boilie you just cooked a few hours before.
What to do then?
Self made boilies are for sure what carp loves more. And if you want them to be attractive for a long time, then you must use the lower possible amount of preserving agents.
Anglers who makes massive baiting on vast areas can notice a great activity of carps right there, but these fishes refuse to eat the boilies on the bottom. Many reasons ae possible for this behaviour and one of these, for sure, it is a sort of repulsion towards bolies too rich of preserving agents. This can be surprising and it can be easy for me to advertise a brand of baits that are not rich of these agents, but I would rather suggest you solutions instead of advertise some specific brand.
Let’s come back to the school of carps that are on your bed of boilies but that refuse to eat. They are there because the boilies actually attracted them but there is something that holds them; in a few words they are patrolling a possible source of food that they don’t want other fish can eat, but still they refuse to eat it themselves. Very likely the bigger carp will flee away form this standing-off to search for some good food elsewhere.
Sometimes the solutions is to use a pop-up with a taste totally different from the baiting boilies or with a peculiar colour. Sometimes it will be sufficient to use a different ready made boilie to have a reaction, leveraging the carp curiosity and softening hesitancy.
When I prepare my seld made boilies I prefer to deep freeze the bags in my refrigerator, cause the not professional vacuum machines are not good enough and some air always remains inside. And mold can grow easily after some time. All the people using a professional vacuum machine can easily store the bags in a fresh room. This approach will be appreciated by fans of both seld and ready made boilies. You need a few hours to prepare some bags of top performing self made boilies and you can use them when you will need to trigger the spooky carp and save the day.
What I said now is not solving all the problems, of course, carp fishing is not so easy. In some cases remember that if the carps on your baiting zone refuse to eat but jump often, that means they are not “disgusted” by the food you are offering.
It can be possible that the carp is not hungry and is just strolling about, taking some snack here and there. And it can be possible the carps are eating and it is just a matter of time before they will take your hooked bait in their mouth, but only if the rig presentation is perfect.
Sorce:
