Dr Paul Garner
Why spod soups have such a dramatic impact on zig results
Our bait expert unveils his deadly ‘soup’ mix for carp
IF YOU aren’t fishing zigs for carp, particularly on well-stocked day-ticket fisheries, you are missing out on some bumper sport.
Carp spend a lot of their time up in the water, especially now, and often well away from baits presented on the bottom.
Hooks and lines are much easier to spot when suspended off the deck, but this is compensated for by competitive feeding behaviour. As the bait slowly sinks they have only a split-second to decide whether to eat it or not before it falls out of range, or is snaffled by another fish.
Spodding ‘soup’ over zigs has been a revelation in recent seasons. It not only pulls fish into your peg, but stimulates them into feeding and clouds the water, making it easier to disguise the end tackle.
Getting your soup mix spot-on, and indeed deciding if this is the correct tactic on the day, can make or break your session, so be sure you get your baiting right.
Many anglers put the reason for carp coming up in the water down to thermoclines, that lead to the warmer water being closest to the surface. This is occasionally true, but more often than not it is the sun’s warmth being absorbed on to the carp’s dark backs that encourages them to come up in the water.
Why they are there may seem irrelevant, but it isn’t. If the water is still cold, the fish won’t need to eat a great deal, so a spod soup approach will be most effective.
If the water is warm you might need to introduce more food to hold the fish, and a baggin’ waggler or pellet waggler approach might be more suitable.
HANG TIME
My aim when putting together a spod soup is to use ingredients that maximise the time the bait hangs in the water column.
This means I have to introduce bait less frequently, but on large windswept venues the undertow can drag the bait a considerable distance as it sinks.
This undertow isn’t always a negative, though, as on many occasions I have watched carp following the slick upwind until they find the source.
As a general rule, the finer the particles, the slower they will sink. You can test different ingredients in a bowl of water or in the margins to see what the hang-time is like. I’ll often sieve out the larger particles from my mix and run them through a liquidiser or coffee grinder to get rid of the lumps.
One of the best ingredients to use in your mix is fastbreakdown pellets. A few handfuls of these pellets covered in water will break down quickly, leaving you with a very fine cloud of particles.
To the broken down pellets - which have a very sloppy consistency - add just enough fishmeal groundbait to produce a porridge-like consistency. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to ladle in the groundbait as it will dry the mix out and it is very easy for it to become too stiff. Ideally, when the bait soup is spodded out it should wash out of the spod quickly, rather than come out in lumps.
If I feel the need to add some larger food items to the soup then there are a couple of baits that will sink slowly. The first is flaked maize – soak it overnight to soften it up - the cornflake like make-up of this bait mean that it flutters slowly through the water. The second bait to add are overwhetted expander pellets. Pump these as you normally would to produce soft hooker pellets and then place them in a tub of water for an hour. The resulting pellets will have blown up and be very slow sinking.
BOTTOM UP
Spodding out my soup-like mix will catch an awful lot of fish, but it isn’t the cleanest of tactics. At the end of a session it can often look as if there’s more bait on you than out in the lake as the sloppy mix flies everywhere.
A much cleaner alternative, that
offers a very different presentation is to use a mix that sinks before releasing floating particles that rise through the water column. This might sound odd, but if you think about it, carp are accustomed to picking off fly larvae as they do just that.
Nash Bait’s Giro Bug Mix is a good starting point for ‘fly hatch’ mixes, creating a cloud on the way down and then rising particles, with some hanging in midwater.
Because this is more akin to a normal groundbait mix, it can be balled in without the need for a spod, and it will keep you a lot cleaner.