What has Prebaiting Come To?

Prebaiting before a session, particularly for Carp Fishing, has always been an effective method of bringing in the bites, but is the modern style and method of approach nowadays too excessive?

Constant advances in baiting up equipment has subsequently led to a huge increase in the amount of bait and free offerings being piled into the water but what effect is this having on our fish populations and how much is too much?

I find it astounding every time I go fishing at a lake, and come across another angler with a couple of rods, more bait then I would use in a week, and yet they aren’t fishing. Instead they are simply preparing for their fish the next day by spodding in a few gallons of grub, and creating a huge, expensive carpet of bait .

Baiting up before a session has always been popular, but over the last couple of decades, the approach has changed. No longer does a couple of handfuls the morning before a session suffice.

A ‘modern style’ approach to baiting up seems to consist of a couple of hours deploying as much bait and attractants around an area as possible. The evolution of this new style of mass baiting has led to a host of new inventions and tools to assist with the job, aiding both the speed and accuracy of the process. No more does the faithful catapult sit at the anglers right hand side, ready and waiting to deliver a small pouch of goodies into the water, but this demotion is to be expected when you consider that some of its successors can cost up to £1000!

I am of course talking about the infamous bait boats designed for maximum accuracy and efficiency but there are many other modern methods to put your bait into the water that don’t seem quite so out of sync with the pure sport of fishing. Spodding, requiring a good spod rod and a solid spod reel is probably the most popular method presently for baiting up with large quantities, but angling has also witnessed the recent arrival of the boilie throwing stick, and the ‘hand of god’ which literally shovels bait into the water.

So it’s clear that people are prepared to spend a couple of hundred pounds on baiting up equipment, a few hundred more in some cases where Bait Boats are involved. This means at the outset alone for simply the equipment, people are prepared to spend a fair amount just to put bait in the water, a job the hand used to do for free not so long ago. Suddenly that ten quid day ticket doesn’t seem quite so dear,however the excessive costs don’t stop there.

Naturally spending this amount of money and having a boilie stick or a good spodding setup encourages you to use it. A bait boat is undoubtedly fun and this ‘big boys toy’ needs no further encouragement to see it navigating the water regularly.

Whenever I go down to a venue to fish I see both these methods frequently used to launch tens if not hundreds of pounds worth of bait into the water for a single session! Anglers happily spend a couple of hours piling bait into a swim the morning or night before a session, topped up further during the fish. I see the 5 gallon buckets of expensive baits containing a mixture of the most effective boilies, pellets, groundbait and hunger enticing additives such as betaine, as I walk by with a sandwich bag of breadcrumb and sweetcorn and can’t help but feel its sometimes slightly absurd.

I watch the increasingly popular TV shows, which continually focus more on the baiting up aspects of fishing taking the first part of an episode to advertise the hundreds of pounds worth of high quality bait that they are about to spod in for a 48 hour session in the hope to catch a fish! Even with this colossal approach to baiting, there are times they fail to catch, but even when they do pull a couple of carp out the water during the session I wonder is it worth it? Probably, certainly in their eyes, but I feel much more of an angler when I pull a stalked Carp out from under an overhanging willow tree on just a piece of corn or flake having not prebaited or laid out a royal carpet of delicatessen carp food.

Not only can this excessive approach to baiting have a negative impact on our fish, producing larger weights at the expense of less healthy, misshapen specimens, but this style of fishing presented in TV shows and apparent on the majority of lakes is naturally passed down onto the new young anglers, convincing them that in order to catch a carp they have to buy the best possible bait and tonnes of it.

When I was a young angler, I wouldn’t have dreamed of spending the equivalent to a couple of hundred pounds on bait solely to chuck out before a session, it would have seemed preposterous. The idea that fishing requires this kind of expense in my eyes certainly alleviates some of the fun and relief that angling is famed for bringing. It seems the tranquillity and subtlety of fishing is being replaced with a more pugnacious approach and vastly increased expenditure. The study of watercraft, where and when the fish might reside and feed has been replaced by attempting to force fish on the feed, and push them towards designated areas and easier locations for the angler to fish.

There is no doubt that pre baiting can be an extremely effective method, especially for session fishing. However I personally don’t believe it always requires the colossal expense that many are willing to spend on bait and equipment. There will be some new articles on the Carp Fishing Reels website soon that look into cheaper baiting methods particularly supermarket baits, but for the time being I just thought I’d remind you that you can still catch on a lonesome piece of sweetcorn, and you don’t need to spend hundreds of pounds in order to catch a carp.