The Best Winter Carp Bait Recipes For Catching Carp In Winter With Jim Shelley

If you’re looking for the best winter carp bait recipes then you’ve come to the right place. In today’s blog post and video Jim Shelley shows you one of the key baiting techniques he uses when catching Carp in Winter time.

Right, a taboo question, winter carp fishing. Now, if you’ve followed me over the years, I seem to catch quite a lot of Carp in the winter. There are several things I do to achieve this. I do normally fish big, well stocked waters which give you bites which is good. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends.

Now, everyone knows I’m a boilie fisherman so choosing the right option from my repertoire of winter carp bait recipes is essential. I don’t zig fish. I’m not interested with that. Why wouldn’t I do that? Purely, I don’t want to foul hook the fish. I don’t want to lose a fish and I don’t want to lose a big, target fish of the lake. Purely because I’ve had a hook pull at the net.

The Best Winter Carp Bait Recipes Involve Bite Fishing With Boilies

There’s a simple way I like to prepare what I call bite fishing with boilies. Now, we can all fire boilies out. Unless you put liquids on, they’re basically just a boilie laying on the bottom. They’ve got no attractiveness to them, no pulling power.

Now, this is my sort of Zig fishing. It’s the best way to explain it. I don’t use maggots. I’m not interested with that, not one single bit. So you can see where I’m coming from. Foam and maggots are not for me.

Catching Carp In Winter – A Step By Step Recipe Guide

Step 1: So the first thing I would do is take the winter boilie I’m using at the moment, the Urban Bait Strawberry Nutcracker (on general sale at Urban Bait from March 2018). You can either sit there and do it yourself with a crush but, if you’ve got an understanding wife like I have, you can use a food blender. So I’m sitting there and I do about 5 or 10 kilo in one go and I freeze it down. So that’s one job done.

If I do 10 kilos, it takes me about 15 minutes. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got fine, smaller pieces of food items. I want mostly crumbs but some chunks. Now if you were crumbing with your hand, you’ll end up with too many, big chunky bits which I don’t want. I don’t want to overfeed them. I’m trying to pull them in. It’s like there’s something in the water but there is a load of food items. You hold a handful of bait and you’ve got, let’s just say 20 baits. You hold a handful of crumb and it’s basically nothing apart from a few bits, a few bits of food items and just crumb.

Step 2: So, when I get to that part I need to add something to pull them. Now I’m a great believer in this word ‘Chum Line’. For me it’s like a Chum Line. I use it in my float fishing, boilie fishing in the summer. I like to glug them with different liquids like salmon oil, etcetera, etcetera.

Now, with the water temperature being low, you can’t really use salmon oil or fish oils and stuff like that. So, I use my oil carrier, namely hemp oil. If you’ve ever chucked a handful of hemp in the winter in the edge, it’ll just flat spot it off. Now it works in real, real low temperatures. So that’s the start of my Chum line.

Step 3: Next I want to add other liquids like Nut Juice. Everything likes nut juice, which is basically from Tiger nuts. The other part to add is liquid Liver. Why would I want to do that? The Carp love Liver. I like to have extra Liver put in my bait, in my pop up mix when I make my own cork balls. This is an important element that some anglers leave out of their winter carp bait recipes but I don’t.

The reason being, it’s highly digestible. So when you add it in liquid form to your mix, what you’ve then got is an oil as a carrier which works well when the water temperature is below 10 degrees. Now, like I said, fish oils won’t work. The oil disperses and goes away. It dissipates. It just goes on the winds and just spreads out as shown in the accompanying video footage. This also carries the food signals.

Step 4: Finally, what I like to add to the final part of the crumb boilie mix, is stick mix. You can mix it up a day before, the night before. I like to do it just before I’m going to set out fishing because once you’ve broken a boilie, it acts like a massive sponge. It’s gonna suck the liquid attractors into it. It coats all the little bits of stick mix because there’s no chunky boilie. It’s just in powder form and then you’ve got your crumb boilie.

Why Do You Want Chunks On The Bottom?

So, why do you or I want chunks on the bottom? Because we’re feeding them then, although not a lot. I would say, out of a handful of the mix I use, probably, I wouldn’t even say 10 percent, 15 percent of it is actually food items, chunks, and they are small chunks. But they do act as sponges. So when they’re on the bottom, if anything touches them, little fish like Bream, Tench or, if you’re lucky, Carp, it then sets the oil off. It’s like, pinging on the top again. So, that reactivates the area.

It’s a bit like fishing with pellets. It’s a bit hard this time of year for pellets to break down because once you start getting the water temperature below 10 degrees, fish oils don’t work. So I like to bait little and often, fishing a bit like match fishing. It’s like maggots, it’s just little bits. It’s not firing out loads of boilies.

Starting Your Session With Your New Mix

So to start, I’d cast my rod out. I’m not worrying about getting a marker out, all the rest of it. All I roughly want to do is cast in my area and then I spomb out two or three to start with. So, that’s the start of the session over one rod. That’s activated.

Now, depending on liners, fish being seen, fish being caught, I’d add maybe one spomb every hour if I hadn’t caught anything yet. It’s like noise and then you’ve got that attractiveness in the water, reactivating it, pulling fish in. But if I get bites, then I’m going to speed it up. I only like to put a few boilies out when I’m fishing because it’s whole food items. I want them to come to that hook bait and pick the hook bait up, not sit there picking up loads of boilies.

Now, if I’m using this water as my main winter water, I like to put more boilies in when I leave than when I’m fishing. Apart from when I’m getting bites. Now, when I start getting more and more bites, I’m gonna add more and more boilies to it. Then I’ll add the spomb/spod mixture and once you’ve got that food going it’s just happy days. I’ve caught so many carp from this recipe. Well I am known for winter fishing after all.

Catching carp in winter is the best time for me. It’s quieter and you can catch ridiculous amounts. When I hit places like Waveney Valley Lakes, I can bag 80 to 106 twenties for the winter. Now, I know it’s my job ,but a lot of people don’t catch that in the summer. The other part of it is you have got to keep the bait going in and regular.

So, once I’m happy with everything, I’ve got the spot sorted and I’m happy with where I’m fishing, I just like to keep everything topped up. At the end of the day think about it. Say there were ten anglers fishing per day, a stringer, 10 baits, a stick mix, a kilo, it goes down to nothing. So basically the fish are reverting when they want something to eat to natural food larders. So you have to compensate for that and if you’ve got a Bream and Tench problem, and diving birds, that’s another problem. So, all you need to do is prepare these winter carp bait recipes the way I’ve shown you and this mix will catch you more Carp.

This Winter Carp Bait Recipes Ingredients

Nutcracker Carp Stick Mix
Carp Bait Hemp Oil
Nut Juice
Liver Extract

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