Food for thought
Hi everyone I hope you have still managed to be getting some much needed angling in during this second big lockdown!
I have been as keen as ever and my winter campaign although interfered with by all this day only rule has been both interesting and fruitful, ill reserve the details for a later report.
It occurred to me that you guys like tips and advice that leads to more action and with that in mind I thought I would mention a few a few things I use on a regular basis but perhaps never mentioned before.
As you all might well know I am a huge fan of the Enterprise sweetcorn, I happen to think the flavoured versions are more prolific and seem to get me quicker bites.
I have lost count of the numbers of carp I have caught on both the Tutti fruiti and Pineapple versions Enterprise make, however I think it worth mentioning a few other tricks I often use particularly on pressured waters where you often need a little edge or two to nick a few extra bites.
When we want to make something look as close to real sweetcorn as possible why not do the same with the smell, I open a fresh can of Jolly Green Giant and pour that awesome smelling sweetcorn juice into a pot of unflavoured plastic corn to which I also add half a tea spoon full of salt and one half a spoon of sugar to the mix, the salt and sugar act as a preservative of the juice the corn is sat in and act to enhance the taste at the same time, the corn smells exactly like a fresh juicy grain of corn the carp love it as well as all other species.
With that said another good tip I can highly recommend is to keep Enterprise plastic Tigers in a pot of real tiger nut extract ( which can be bought on E bay) it is actually the real juice extracted from tiger nuts it’s a very popular drink in countries such as Spain.
Contrary to what you might think at artificial baits will absorb some of these natural liquids and the carp certainly find them to their liking.
Should you wish to experiment more I have some suggestions for you, carp find alcohol very attractive believe it or not and you can get some rather startling results by soaking the artificial hook bait in pots of spirits and liquors, heres some I recommend Vodka, Whiskey, Brandy ,Tia Maria, Quantro {orange flavour} Baileys however baileys is thick and does not soak in so fast.
Don’t forget Enterprise do artificial boilies these are very underused in my opinion, they have advantages over normal boilie hook baits in as much as they retain constant buoyancy without absorbing water and ruining presentation especially on weedy waters or on silt where a pop up needs to maintain buoyancy more.
They are cray proof if your unlucky enough to be on a water where crays are a problem.
They also maintain their colour without being tainted by silt so easy.
And as I already alluded to they take on attractors and flavours extremely well, the other ace up the sleeve is these boilies are also available in glow in the dark options, now this is totally under used and is so very different, I often use a food bait with a glow in the dark smaller pop up boilie on top snow man style this has been a game changer, I have had nights where this addition has mad all the difference, I had a monster brace of commons in Italy on this tactic the first night I tried it, it then led me to a string of further captures that week when the identical set up without the glow in the dark was not doing it for me, I remember thinking “why the hell did I not do this tactic more often”
I remember showing my old mate Shaun Harrison the glow in the dark plastic boilies about 20 years ago now Shaun is a very smart angler and very open minded he took some off me and tried them in a heart beat, the result was he caught his first ever English 40 on them straight away, I believe Shaun enjoyed huge success on the Mangrove on those unusual baits.
So there you go food for thought till next month tight lines
Frank
