Carp fishing legend Terry Hearn is no stranger to catching stunning river carp. As revealed in some of his videos such as Lady Pearl, Tel has been getting some great river carp fishing results on his boilies by giving them a few tweaks.
You can do this with any freezer bait and its great for adding an edge when defrosting even large quantities of bait such as bulk boilie deals.
Here’s how he does it..
What you need to make Terry’s river carp fishing bait
- Your chosen freezer baits such as Mainline Baits, Dynamite Baits, Sticky Baits, CC Moore or DNA Baits.
- Air dry boilie bag (weigh sling or landing net can be used instead)
- A tube of Saxa Salt
- A large sandwich bag or tub
Terry continues….
The River Thames contains many small fish as well as Chinese Mitten Crabs, and so to help my hook-baits last the night I like to air dry them first. The thing with air dried baits is they tend to be less attractive, sucking moisture instead of pumping out food signals, and so on the river I often like to use salt in the drying process. As well as having the desired effect of hardening your hook-baits, salt is also very attractive to carp.
Although I sometimes use a small amount of salt on my freebies, this process is more for hookbaits only, as you wouldn’t want to feed them too much of the stuff…just like us really.
Step 1
Take some boilies out of the freezer
Step 2
Take a handfull or two of frozen freebies and drop them into an air dry bag. Here I’m using Dynamite’s CompleX-T which is a highly palatable, relatively soft and loose textured bait, and so for hookbaits on the river its a good idea to toughen them up a bit. I also like using The Souce.
Step 3
Leave them to dry for a day or two. Obviously how long you leave freezer carp baits to dry is dependent on where you leave them and how warm it is, but with the heatwave we’ve been getting this summer I found that 24hrs was enough.
Step 4
Drop the semi-dry baits into a bag of pure, natural sea salt. The Saxa stuff from Tesco is just fine. I used a mix of both coarse and fine grain. Seal the bag and then give them a shake every so often.
The salt will pull out any remaining moisture towards the surface of the baits, leaving the centres hard. As well as making them ever so attractive, they’re now shelf life so there’s no need to re-freeze.
The longer you leave them the better they’ll be, in fact I’m still using up a batch of smaller ones which I made last year.
Step 5
The finished result. Some I made earlier…tough, super salty and super attractive.
