Carp Fishing's Biggest Edge... How To Prebait Effectively!

We all know that carp fishing can be challenging at times so in this video I'm going to talk to you about a little edge that will change your carp fishing completely, doubling if not tripling or quadrupling your chances of catching. So this magical edge that will catch you more carp than ever is pre-baiting. What is pre-baiting? Well it's just the act of going to the water that you intend to fish and introducing bait before you go down for your session. Of course we've all gone carp fishing for a day, maybe for 24 hours, maybe we've gone for a whole week and camped out on the bank for long periods of time, but by pre-baiting you're increasing the chances of you catching on the lead up to your session. Hypothetically pre-baiting could work on any location, be it a lake, a river, canal, big or small pond, but I've certainly found it more beneficial on larger locations, places where actually finding the carp can be tricky. The lake I'm fishing now it's absolutely huge, carp could be almost a mile away up the other end and when you're on somewhere that is this big where the fish could be very spread out, concentrating on a certain area, introducing bait every day, every couple of days on the lead up to your session is meaning that there's more and more and more chance that the carp will be there when you turn up to fish. So before you start pre-baiting you've got to think about where you're actually going to do it, you've got to choose a spot. To do this I like to use a marker float or just a lead tied on the end of some braid. Braid is quite important because braid doesn't really stretch, so when you are casting around and dragging that lead across the bottom you really feel what's going on on the lake bed. I've actually made a video on this channel all about feature finding, learning what it feels like when you throw your lead out into weeds or when it hits gravel or when you're fishing in silt, so definitely check that out if you're new to carp fishing and you want to learn about finding features. But essentially once I've found a spot that I'm happy with, maybe it's a little gully of silt in between a load of weed or maybe I'm on a lake that's silty and I've just found a spot that's a little bit firmer or even gravelly where the fish have cleaned the bottom off, I will then put the line in the clip because I know that that's the distance. I'll remember where I cast to and then use distance sticks to count the number of wraps to get back to that spot in the future. It's certainly not ideal just to throw your bait out all over the place because you might not actually be casting your rigs accurately where the bait was when you come to do your session. Once I've found the area that I want to pre-bait, I'll normally use a marker float so I can pop it up to the surface and get a visual on where that area is. Once I've done that I've got to decide whether I can feed with a catapult if it's quite close in or if I have to use a spawn if it's further out. Normally the catapult is better if you're feeding with larger baits, maybe big pellets, boilies or tiger nuts. But if you're trying to put out small particles like hemp, you're almost certainly going to need a spawn to be able to get the distance as small baits and a catapult don't really go very far. Choosing what bait you're going to use for some people can be quite complicated. There is so many different flavours of boilies and types of bait available. Almost all the time when I'm pre-baiting I start with particles, be that hemp seed, maize potentially or just like a ready-made particle mix that you can buy from tackle shops or animal food stores. Personally I prepare my particles myself because it's a lot cheaper if you go online, find an animal food supplier and buy loads of hemp seed or tiger nuts or something dry and then soak it and boil it up yourself rather than buying the prepared stuff from the shop. It depends what quantities you're going to be doing it in but I've got myself a big Berco boiler which is like a big drum and I tip it all in like a night before, cover it in water so it all soaks in and then boil it for about half an hour. This makes the bait softer and it lets the particles absorb the water meaning that they are safe for fish to eat and also the fish just respond to them better once they've softened down a little bit and they're not so hard. But I'd say the main reason why I almost always start pre-baiting with something like hemp seed is because lots of smaller fish will eat the hemp seed and also it gets stuck in the silt on the bottom and that means the fish will dig for it over a prolonged period of time. If you pre-baited with just a big handful of boilies from the start a fish might come through just eat those boilies and move on but I like to get all of the different species rooting around in the area clearing the bottom, disturbing the silt, clearing the weeds away from the spot because you're removing the chance of your spot having little bits of weed or slimy horrible silt on in the area and then when you come to carp fish you're going to be able to present your baits better without your hooks getting stuck in that low-lying weed or silt. How regularly you bait up is quite important because there's no point throwing loads and loads of baiting on a spot waiting a whole month and then going down and fishing it because they've probably eaten all the bait and then the advantage of pre-baiting has kind of worn off by the time it gets to your session. In an ideal world you'd get down the pond after work every day during the week a little bit of bait each time building up the swim and then you fish it on the weekend for example however if the lake's quite far away or you're busy with work then getting down the lake a couple of times during the week would certainly still be helping and giving you more chance of catching. I know I said that I like to start pre-baiting with small baits hemp seed and whatnot that's great for a while however when it comes to actually doing a session what you might find is that those small baits have drawn in just too many bream, roach, rudd, tench and they then begin to get in the way of your carp fishing. Now I love catching a big bream or a you know or a chunky tench however when you're specifically targeting a big carp if bream keep picking up your baits they will be scaring the carp away each time you catch them so over time I will start to slow down the amount of small particle baits that I'm putting in and start to switch over to using larger baits be that tiger nuts or boilies. On lakes with particularly high numbers of bream and tench I actually fish with 20mm boilies on the hook to get through to the carp and I'll also begin to pre-bait with boilies too however if the lake you're fishing doesn't have a smaller fish in it and it's pretty much just carp then there's absolutely no issue with pre-baiting with smaller baits all the way through. Now one thing I just thought of is that pre-baiting is great if you're likely to be the only person who fishes that particular spot even if you've just got a little group of friends who fish a certain area you can maybe work together one of you chuck in some bait one day another go down the day after and then you can all fish together or create some sort of rota where you all get a chance to reap the rewards that you've you know you've invested however if your lake's quite busy and you go pre-bait the most popular swim you're probably just feeding the fish for someone else to go and catch them and it can work against you actually to pre-bait on a very busy lake as someone will see you throwing the bait in someone will probably go and fish over the top of it and yeah in some cases it is actually going to work against you so definitely consider pre-baiting an area of the water which is less busy or choose a location like a river for example where you're less likely to see other anglers my best times of carp fishing have been where i've picked a spot on a long length of river out the way with no one else around i've pre-baited for weeks and weeks and then i've gone and had an amazing session because i've invested the time the effort and some money in the bait but it always always pays off