Question Chris, my mate believes that there are some carp that never eat boilies, what do you reckon, and also, i have used seafood baits before with limited success, i am going down this route again, come spring, cockles, mussels, whelks, prawns, what do you reckon about their effectiveness.
I think there are many hard to catch carp in big lakes that don't take boilies. Assume the lake is big enough to support just a few specimen carp that are used to eating naturals, these fish are seldom if ever caught on boilies.
Not really surprising. In a situation where there's plenty of food and little competition, they might come across a few boilies thrown in and eat em, but its not sustainable Imo. It would be an expensive, prolonged and determined baiting campaign that makes em switch to an unnatural man-made bait and the bait better be good.... very good!
I believe for a campaign to work well, it must satisfy the carps needs in terms of both quantity and quality of food.
It must overcome their natural instinctive behaviour to feast on something else, easy to do on a lake stuffed with fish and little else to eat, not so easy on a lake that already provides them with everything they need.
Nothing to do with shape or size of the bait, its the processing that puts em off... cooked eggs and flavours.
Fishmeal is, as you probably know, mainly processed bi-catch and waste (crushed bone, skin, heads, bony fish, starfish, urchin you name it) from the fish processing factory which has been cooked to high temperatures, boiled, steamed and dried. There's all sorts in there and a real mix of denatured amino acids. Very confusing to the carp Imo.
Fishmeal specific, i.e. crab, GLM, anchovy, sardine, shrimp, krill... these are processed in a similar way but their amino acid profile, although largely denatured, is unique to the species. The advantage being; many can be bought fermented/predigested, kapi, belachan, KPH for example which is, to my mind, several times more effective to ordinary none descriptive fishmeal baits. Solubility from the pre-digestion process is key to what makes a bait work in our favour as opposed to cooked, alcohol poisoned and denatured.
Fresh, raw uncooked, prawns, mussels, cockles.. only work to a degree (of uncertainty) as their amino acid profile is minimal due to the lack of solubility but they're better than cooked and much better when the enzymes get to work on em... 2-3 days old should do it!