Seriously, a carp bait can’t be more natural than that !! Millions of words have been written about this issue during the last few decades in every carp angling magazine, all across Europe. But what is really to be considered totally natural for a carp bait? Many people would consider any particle (corn, potato, beans, tigernuts i.e.) a truly natural carp bait, but is it really natural for a carp to find this kind of food in the lake or river bed? hmmm, not really i guess ! Of course they are easy to be recognized as food for carp and many other fish species but they are not part of every day menu for sure (please take note i’m talking about carp born and grown in natural and wild waters).
Personally i’ve always been a big fan of boilies, very rarely i use feed pellets and even more rarely i use particles. This has been dictated of course from the places i’ve been fishing for most of my time during the years, with exception of China. Over there it has been a real struggle to put the puzzle together, over the years i’ve been trying so many different approach i can not even remember in order to catch carp and black carp.
I have used some serious amount of boilies with not a single carp landed, than groundbait for coarse fishing and sweetcorn was the turn around for me and i was finally able to land some nice little common carp. Over a couple of seasons i managed to land a good number of carp over there but nothing that was tipping the scale over the 3Kg mark basically. Later on i finally started to fish successfully for black carp, and the key was nothing but the bait : freshwater snails. This fish is a “carnivorous” relative of the grass carp and it only feed on snails, mussels, crabs, crayfish and so on. It was for me a big surprise when around 4 years ago after landing few back carp i hooked something that was feeling different, it was fighting in a very different way, well this turned out to be my very first 10Kg+ wild common carp caught in China !! Since then i’ve been fishing with boiled corn in a couple of rods and snails on the other two rods for black carp, but guess on which rod i caught all the biggest carp during my last 4 session? Yes correct, on the rods that were fishing with a snail.
So it can not be a coincidence, over the last 5 session all the biggest carp i caught was on freshwater snail, with boiled corn i landed many carp, but all little babies… Would i use this approach here in Europe? hmmm not really, at least for the moment, but over there in China where in some places carp have never seen a hook and nor a bait introduced by humans looks like it’s a pretty good solution !!
By Enrico Parmeggiani
