Bait changes through the year.

Just this morning I've prepared 2 kilo of tares to last me until the end of October.
It got me thinking of the changes I make through the year with the baits I use.
The start of last season I committed to totally ignoring carp preferring silver fish.
From Christmas of 2014 I decided to have only one day a week messing with carp and fish my other days for roach.
That then progressed to fishing how I did when I was far younger than now. From the first time when I was around 10yrs old until I had a very serious health issue in 1998 I was very happy running a stick down the Trent or fishing the rivers Glenn and Upper Welland.

Unfortunately I can't return to that kind of fishing buy can target the same species. So the end of last summer I came to the conclusion that for some reason I wasn't enjoying fishing nearly as much as I did back then.

OK big weights come easy on commercials and if that's your thing that's fine by me. I have enjoyed commercial carp fishing when it was new to me but it's become very old hat in double quick time.

So as far as I'm concerned carp are not even in any waters I fish. A couple of years now I've gone back to bread punch through winter and really had a good time, even though the last month both the roach and skimmers are dodging me.

I'm now on pinkies and caster over groundbait, any warmer days it will be hemp and tares which is probably my favourite bait. Hemp, it's a bait I've used as feed but not been able to use as a hook bait for some time but I now can hook hemp with no trouble with the use of a simple cork.

I've totally given up on pellets, the only plus for pellet is they're cheap. Trouble is they attract carp, a species out of favour with me.
They are an excellent bait for skimmers and Crucians I will try not to use expander pellet but the jury is out on that one as yet.

Other baits that I will ignore are meat a bait that has caught me a shedload of fish, sweet corn a decent bait but it attracts what I'm trying to avoid.
The only baits I hope to use will be maggot, caster, worm, hemp, tares and bread.

Does anyone else have reasons for baits they will not use.

Bloodworm and Joker - 'cos I don't even know what it/they are/is.

Expander pellets - sounds like a load of bother to me.

Boilies - I've never caught anything on boilies apart from the mini ones. I've got several sacks of the things that I keep meaning to give to someone at the local club lakes.

Sonubaits Hali Hookers - you can't hook 'em 'cos they split. You can't drill them 'cos they split. They're sh1t, and they split.

Squats and pinkies - dunno where I'd get them. Aren't they just small maggots?

There's probably many more to be added but I basically use maggots, worms, corn, casters, hemp and pellets where I know there's no Carp. And bread sometimes. And I tried floating biscuits for the first time at the weekend. And luncheon meat.

For my type of fishing that i do which is predominantly targeting large chub and river roach my all time favourite bait is definitely warburtons or Hovis bread

I'll actually use bread all of the river season for the quality silvers however if I tend to get pestered to frequently by small fish during the summer on bread I'll then revert to using large bunches of maggots on size 10-8 hooks as it'll take just that little longer for minnows and other tiny fish sometime before they completely devour a bunch of about a dozen maggots

If I'm fishing for big river perch I'll normally use small live baits IE bleak or dace,
I'll also use air injected lobworms.

Throughout the river season I now only really target quality chub, roach and perch and this pretty much keeps me busy enough for the full 9 months

So for me it's bread, maggots, worms and live baits.

For my still water fishing it's mainly corn or maize , meat , pellets , maggots and then groundbait , wetted micros on a feeder and hemp normally added to a groundbait mix .

Used worm but never caught much except roach and skimmers on them .

Running water is mainly bread , and various pastes

Going to try using an oily pellet groundbait mix in summer in a feeder for the chub . Oh and some meat


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The original question was what bait don't you use and the reason for that.
My don't use very often bait are live maggots. Not that I have anything against them but a 40 mile round trip just doesn't make much sense when I can buy maggots in bulk when in town and freeze them to use if and when.

Maybe I would catch more on live ones. I don t know. I certainly catch enough on dead 'uns even perch and chub. All I have to do is walk down to my shed and take out a packet of frozen gits from the bait freezer.

john step said:

The original question was what bait don't you use and the reason for that.
My don't use very often bait are live maggots. Not that I have anything against them but a 40 mile round trip just doesn't make much sense when I can buy maggots in bulk when in town and freeze them to use if and when.

Maybe I would catch more on live ones. I don t know. I certainly catch enough on dead 'uns even perch and chub. All I have to do is walk down to my shed and take out a packet of frozen gits from the bait freezer.

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I'm sure I've put up a few posts before about the use of dead maggots and have to say that I've used em for many years like this,

I normally buy around a gallon of red maggots at a time, take home, sieve out any debris, saw dust or maise meal and then freeze by the pint,

I seal em in a freezer bag with as much air sqeezed out of the bag as poss and then placed in large Tupperware boxes and then froze,

Incidentally it can take up to a good 36 - 48 hrs for the maggots to completely die, if taken back out anytime before this the maggots can come back to life because they haven't actually died yet, all that has happened is that there metolobism has slowed right down.

I leave mine for well over 48 hrs at the earliest before I wanna use em as dead maggots,

Once defrosted normally the night before I'm due to go fishing I then normally add some fresh maise meal to em and now because there dry from the maise they are a perfect bait to fish with,

I use a lot of em if I'm fishing the rivers when trotting for chub, dace and roach etc.


The baits that I don't really use much of these days are boilies, pellets and luncheon meat

dont use sweetcorn much, if at all-never seem to doany good with it (certainly compared to other baits)

Used to fish mainly for carp (3 forties and 42 thirties) but now I mainly fish for roach. Hook baits used for roach: usually bread (Warburtons blue sliced) which is used flavoured. The following baits occasionally: maggots, pellets (in the warmer months), hemp, wheat and lobworms. I very occasionally use mini boilies and prawns and bits of Haribo sweets.

Wheat is a great bait so no surprise I suppose that bread is as well!

Slugs, there is no way I would ever be able to handle them to collect them or hook them.

sweetcorn is a great bait , seems to hold fish in the swim i find if used in with ground bait . great tench bait and roach bait too !

going to try to use hotdog more as well this year

Boilies. There was a time when I wouldn't be without 10mm Ringer's White Shellfish boilies for use with the method, but TBH maize seems to do just as well and is dirt cheap. In any event, most of the water's I've been fishing have boilie bans in place, so the ten tubs of ESP pop-ups that I won have hardly been touched. Shame to waste them, so I'll offer them to the carp lads on the place I fish for roach, when I finally manage to get back in the saddle. Unless there's a member who lives nearby and wouldn't mind picking them up...

often sweetcorn went on a quickstop on a method feeder last summer

cheeper than all these pellets

thecrow said:

Slugs, there is no way I would ever be able to handle them to collect them or hook them.

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Used to free line them for chub on the Dane , not the nicest bait to hook but pretty effective.

thecrow said:

Slugs, there is no way I would ever be able to handle them to collect them or hook them.

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A bait box with a good lid is all that is needed with a few wet leaves and grass cuttings placed inside,

That's where pliers or forceps come in handy for collecting and hooking

A very good underrated summer chub bait and surprisingly enough for barbel aswell :thumbs:

What about nitrile gloves ?


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Luncheon meat, there is absolutely no way I can get it to stay on a hair. I also have absolutely no confidence in bread flake either, I just can't get it to stay on the hook.

swizzle said:

Luncheon meat, there is absolutely no way I can get it to stay on a hair.

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I manage by using a bait band.

I pull the band through the meat until it's just poking out the base and then thread a bit of grass or reed or whatever through the end of the band to stop the meat dropping off. It seems to stand up to my erratic and violent casting efforts.

swizzle said:

Luncheon meat, there is absolutely no way I can get it to stay on a hair. I also have absolutely no confidence in bread flake either, I just can't get it to stay on the hook.

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Try Korum bait cages. You put them on a hair. Two sizes available.
They are a small cylindrical mesh of plastic.
A roll of breadflake or meat or paste inside can be cast and will withstand the peckings of tiddlers and will leak flavour to attract your quarry.

A very effective bait system.

Keep the hair short to stop the hook fouling the mesh.

swizzle said:

Luncheon meat, there is absolutely no way I can get it to stay on a hair. I also have absolutely no confidence in bread flake either, I just can't get it to stay on the hook.

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Bread flake is a piece of cake mate,

It's actually my no: 1 wander bait

It's a falicy to think that it has to be squeezed around the shank of the hook, this is a very outdated way of presenting the bait, in truth I personally think it's a c##p way mg:

Basically break off a piece of bread from a slice about the size of a 10 pence piece, now fold it over and on the hinge of where it's now folded squeeze the centre of the hinge with thumb and index finger so a bit of the hinge is now flat, put about a size 10 wide gape hook cleanly through the flat bit of the bread.

This will nicely fluff around the hook once in the water, incidentally this will actually float and so must have 1-2 AAA shot pinched onto yer hook length about 2-3 inches from the hook so this can now pop up off of the bottom directly from the shot, basically like a pop up boilie.

Alternatively you can actually use a large luncheon meat punch to punch yer bread out into nice round discs and then just simply repeat the process of hooking

I use the green seymo luncheon meat punch to do this and is so very easy to do aswell as being a very effective bait and tactic :thumbs:

I've now put up 2 pics onto me ( profile album ) called ( chalk streams & big chub ) showing me seymo bait punch and bait presentation test tank

Be lucky

I fish here there and everywhere but the one bait I avoid is paste. It's just a load of faffing about in my opinion.