Many carp anglers have tried and tested many different methods of getting the perfect balanced popped up bait. Many companies have there own top brands of pop-ups, pop-up base mixes, cork balls to wrap your base mix round polystyrene balls and more and at very high prices.
I was getting fed up with constantly having to buy a base mix to pop-up my boilies or even fork out 5 pound plus on a small tub of pop-ups. After trying many different types of products and various methods, I decided to experiment a bit to see if I could make it cheaper.
I always like to mix my own base mixes up, either by buying a 50/50 mix and mixing in my own ingredients with it, or by simply just using my own homemade base mix.
Either of these two and other shop bought mixes will all do the same thing.
The perfect cheap pop-up boilie.
My recipe.
200g of fishmeal 200g of ground semolina 400g of white breadcrumb 150g of milk powder 50g of robin red 50/50 mix (optional) Powdered colouring (your choice of colour and amount) I like to use bright yellow or orange baits for high visibility. Flavouring of your choice (I am currently trialling the Source by Terry Hearn) 6 eggs. Olive oil
How to make the mix.
Put all your Powdered ingredients into a bowl an mix together. Then, put it in a food blender on high speed and chop up the mix until it’s a nice fluffy fine powder.
In a separate mixing bowl put in your 6 eggs, add about 2 table spoons of Olive oil and mix up with your flavouring as advised or by personal choice. It’s up to you.
Put your eggs mix into a large mixing bowl and gradually mix in a little base mix at a time, until you get a nice smooth binded ball of base mix.
Use a boilie gun and rolling table if you have one, to roll out your boilies, or as I have done in the past, roll out several long sausages of your mix and cut to your desired boilie size, i.e. 10mm 12mm 14mm 15mm 18mm 20mm 22mm and so on. I tend to do a range of sizes for all occasions. You now have your boilies ready to boil.
Right here’s the trick. Pick out your favoured hook baits from your batch of boilies (before boiling).
I choose about 30 of my favoured baits, and place about 10 at a time on a microwavable plate. Put them in the microwave for about 1 minute on high power. Once you have done this, check the texture of the boilie and see if its starting harden. If it’s still soft to touch and feel, then put them back into the microwave on full power for a further 10 seconds. Keep doing this at 10 second intervals until you have a nice hardened bait (not to hard that you can’t put a boilie needle through it). Get a glass of water and test it. If it floats then your done if not then they need another 10 seconds and so on. Make sure you do not get black burn spots on them.
Once done, put your pop-up baits into a airtight container along with a good bait soak (your flavour) and shake. About 5-10ml is normally enough.
So there you have it. The easy way to make a perfect pop-up. If done correctly, these baits will not sink even when they have been in the water for 24hours. Test them at home in a bowl of water for 24 hours as a trial (that’s what I did) even on a spare hair rig if necessary.
So there you have it. The cheap way of making pop-up boilies. Now all you need to do is boil the rest of the boilies for your freebies. Take out about 20-30 bottom baits and put them in a bait soak and you have pop-ups, bottom hook baits and freebies.
Hope that’s a good tip for all you bargain bashing carpers out there. Tight lines to all.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
(+) Cheap to do when done correctly, good results. (-) FEAR FACTOR - You will look silly if you do it without results. Difficult to carry a large amount.
I'm not into fishing. Thought you were making a cake. Mary-Jane
merv83 11.05.2003 12:39
Great first op, I am not really into fishing, but nevertheless, interesting reading! Martyn!
emmorticia 06.05.2003 22:10
Not into fishing myself, but this sounds like a brilliant way for people who are to save a fair amount of money in the long run! Nice op, welcome to Ciao. Em x
May 6th, 2003
very helpful by (95%):
helpful by (5%):
