Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
The mix no carp can resist
It may not look the most appealing bait, but Craig Mortimer’s budget bread and corn mix is unbeatable!
WHETHER a carp is 3oz, 3lb or 30lb, they will never turn their noses up at a free feed of bread and corn. Match anglers use both to great effect right through the winter and well into early spring, so why not adopt this approach when targeting specimen carp? Even if the fish are completely dormant due to the cold water temperature, the bright visibility that these two baits bring to the table is usually irresistible. Being primarily flavour, colour and cloud, there is nothing to really feed upon, apart from the hookbait. Gardner, Sticky and Daiwa-backed Craig Mortimer has been using this mixture of ‘match baits’ over four winters and his results speak for themselves, with a 31lb 12oz being the biggest to fall to his tactics. With this in mind, Craig’s carping approach just had to be checked out, so we met the 30-year-old Ipswich rod at The Nunnery Lakes complex near Thetford, Norfolk.
Why turn to match baits?
In cold weather, many carpers turn to single hookbaits or fishing maggot on pressured lakes to get a few runs. The problem with the latter is that on a lot of pits you may need to literally loosefeed gallons of maggots to get a response. The beauty of Craig’s bread and corn approach is that as well as catching a lot of fish, the bait bill is a fraction of maggot fishing. Describing why he began using the tactic,
said Craig: “It was one of those eureka moments. I was looking for a loosefeed that was different to what other anglers were using, without breaking the bank!” The young IT consultant’s realisation that corn is one of the primary ingredients in most spod mixes along with some form of groundbait (posh breadcrumb!), seemed a logical step and the idea was born. Keeping things ‘carpy’, Craig likes to add a few crushed Sticky Manilla boilies and liquid to the mixture, which also has a very nutty, creamy flavour that complements the corn and bread mix.
How to make Craig’s mix
Starting with a whole fresh sliced white loaf, he places the lot in a bucket and adds water to produce a mush. Next in goes a 900g bag of frozen corn that has been liquidised, as well as another full bag of frozen whole corn. “I like to add around 1/3 to half a kilo of crushed Manilla boilies and 100ml of the corresponding liquid as this enhances the flavour trail and gives the bigger fish something to graze on without filling them up,” he added. “If I am fishing somewhere shallow or over the top of zigs and I want the slop to make
more of a cloud in the water, I’ll add a little more liquid and lake water. “Alternatively, if the venue is deeper, I stodge it up with the addition of more liquidised breadcrumb or groundbait.” The beauty of Nunnery is there are few, if any, silverfish, but if a water does hold bream, you can get plagued by them at times. By fishing a boilie on the hook, if you do hook a bream or roach, it will generally be of a better stamp, so still worth catching. “I have found in the past that feeding silverfish will draw in the carp, which soon bully these fish away from the swim, so it’s a win, win,” Craig told us.
Fishing the corn slop
As Nunnery is silty, Craig uses a helicopter set-up with a Ronnie rig. Although they look complicated, a Ronnie is a variant of the 360 rig, and Gardner has just released pre-tied Ronnie rigs, so you can either tie ‘em or buy ‘em! The hooklink comprises 8in of 20lb Gardner Invisi Link fluorocarbon, something he loves for a number of reasons. “Firstly, being stiff, if it does get picked up by a nuisance fish, it will reset perfectly,” explained Craig. “The other reason is that in very cold, clear water, fluoro is almost invisible.” The helicopter set-up enables the light 2oz lead to plug into the silt increasing the bolt effect, while the hooklink can move up the leader, so it is well presented on the bottom. This makes the rig almost 100 per cent tangle proof and it’s a set-up which Craig has a great deal of faith in. On the hook, Craig uses a highly visible Sticky 15mm Signature pop-up in either washed out pink or white. These are bright enough to stand out but not so bright that they could possibly spook a more wary carp. A white pop-up also matches the loosefed bread. “I may use corn on the hook, but I have found ‘matching the hatch’ can take longer to work because your hookbait is two grains among hundreds of loosefed items. The pop-up seems to result in much quicker bites in my experience,” Craig told us. To kickstart the session, he Spombs four payloads over the top of each rod, re-feeding another two Spombs after every fish he lands or after every dropped run. “I’m looking for one bite at a time early season, not a hit of fish, so keeping the loosefeed to a minimum is ideal,” he said. “If the day is slow and I haven’t had a bite within two or three hours I would move swims on a day-only session, rather than keep ‘filling in’ a swim that might not turn on later. “When the water is cold, where carp are concerned, if you find one, you normally find all of them! “The beauty is, though, that you haven’t fed a lot of expensive loosefeed, so moving swims isn’t a massive problem.”