NEW SERIES! Andy May reveals a brilliant bait tip for bigger catches

A blend of coarse and fine particles draws in big commercial carp

I’VE been a match angler for a long while now, and for most of that time, boilies have never figured in my plans for carp.

Like many, I’d seen them as a bait only for the bivvy boys who were prepared to play the waiting game. However, we all want to catch bigger fish, and the good news is that the specimen carp boys have given us fish that regularly run well into double figures on a diet of high protein boilies that they’ve been fed.

Even better is that with the fish having a taste for boilies, these baits can now be used as part of my bait menu, and not just as hookbaits. In fact, I’ll rarely use a boilie on the hook, instead creating a very unusual feed to sit alongside the micro pellets and groundbait that I’ll use around a Method feeder. All it takes is good food mixer and a few spare minutes in the kitchen!

BLENDED BOILIES

At Barston Lakes in the West Midlands the effect of boilies was such that match anglers would loosefeed them. This then evolved into grinding them up into small particles to use with a feeder, and this is where I believe boilies truly come into their own for fish around the 10lb mark.

Bigger carp love a boilie, and if you can already begin the breakdown process and give them hundreds of small particles to get stuck into, so much the better. Mini boilies are a super hookbait but always I felt that I could go further than that.

In a random trial, a bag of boilies was dropped into a blender and thoroughly whizzed, and the resulting powder was added to my groundbait and micro pellet mix. The theory was that I’d get all the goodness and flavour from the boilies that the carp seemed addicted to, without overfeeding them. Blended boilies also make a great binder to hold the Method feeder ball together and, on my first session using the mix, the fish I caught were of a much bigger average than I’d expected.

This wasn’t a fluke, either, as the big-carp trend continued over the next few sessions.

The fish on the end is clearly a fan of boilies!

Boilies do seem to pull in the bigger carp.

BUILD THE SWIM SLOWLY Regular casting is part and parcel of fishing the Method feeder but, when big carp are the target, things are different. If you are casting every 10 minutes, you’re going to create an awful lot of commotion which these big fish can be spooked by. Instead, I will wait between 20 and 30 minutes for a bite and then recast, watching the tip for signs of line bites to show whether any fish are in the area. Each cast goes to the exact same spot to build up a bed of bait. Bright hookbaits are essential to stand out alongside the pale groundbait and boilie mix. A 7mm or, even better, a 9mm Dynamite Baits Match Mini Boilie is just the job in yellow or pink.