Shelf-life boilies are an easy to use, convenient bait, available in a huge range of flavours. But there is more to boilies than meets the eye. Why not give these a go next time you go fishing and see what results you get?
- Soak your boilies
One drawback of shelf-life boilies is that they are dried, that’s why they last, which that means they have a hard, dry outer shell which takes a long time to soften in normal use. So, to resolve this issue, and release the built-in attractors quicker, soak them overnight so that they soften slightly. Even better, soak them in the liquor left over from soaking hemp or other particles!
- Make flake
Pop boilies in a food processor to break them up into flakes. Don’t go too small or you will end up with dust, a mixture of sizes is best. The idea is to make a carpet of flakes with your hook boilie on top. As it’s quite fine the flake will get moved around by fish in the swim, so use little and often to keep that carpet of flake hiding your hook bait, a handful every hour or two should do it.
- Wafter boilies
Wafter hook-baits are big right now and that’s simply because they work! The idea is that the bait only just sinks making it easy for the fish to suck in. It also means the bait will go further in, meaning a better hook hold. They are easy to make, just use a boilie corer and replace the removed core with a matching piece of rig foam. You can even adjust the buoyancy by adding more or less rig foam.
- Double bubble
Use two boilies on a hair. This gives a bigger hook bait so only the larger fish can take it. Carp have extremely large mouths and its easy to under estimate what the can take.
- DIY Boilie paste
If you were making flake and went too far and got powder, all is not lost, make boilie paste. You can mix the powder together with egg to make a paste which will be irresistible. Best of all the flavour will match your chosen boilies.
