Bacon grease / Crisco Carp & Catfish recipe

Here’s another one that I’ve been toying with lately. It’s a pretty messy process to make, so I suggest investing in a pan from the dollar store or second hand shop. Also, if you can do this outside, do it. It can get smelly.  There’s a couple different ways to use and rig this – if you have dip bait tube rigs it will work great. Hair rigging requires an extra step.

here’s what you need.

1/2 can of cooking grease (bacon grease, etc. anything that comes off the griddle, and DON’T filter it.) Crisco (butter flavored) works well too. If you can find lard at the grocery store, that’s even better than crisco.

10 tablespoons +/- of garlic salt

2 tablespoons minced garlic

* ice cube trays for making water bottle icecubes (you can get them at the dollar store, and they look like half round tubes)

* very porous sponges (the cheap ones from the dollar store work great) or even cheap scotch brite type scrubbing pads. Cotton balls work as well.

The cooking is pretty simple. Warm up the grease slowly….and carefully.  You are warming up a lot of grease, and it’s flammable!

once the grease is a liquid, throw in the minced garlic and mix well. Then, add the powdered garlic. There’s no exact science to adding the powder, and the grease will start to get thick with all the “mix ins”

Here’s where the steps back differ based on your hook types.

1 – if you are using it with dip tubes or fuzzy hooks (or want to use it like dough-bait) pour the warm grease into the ice cube trays.  A little spray grease helps release once the grease solidifies also. Put the trays right in the freezer and let the mixture solidify, then take them out, cut them into the chunk sizes you want.

2 – if you want to make “bait balls” that can go right on the hook, or can be hair rigged, this is where the sponge comes in.  Cut the sponge into chunks just a bit smaller than what you want the bait size to be.  While the mix is still in the pot, dip the sponge balls (or cotton balls, etc) into the mixture and let them soak up as much goo as they can hold.  pull them out, and place them on saran wrap, or an old icecube tray again, to solidify. The cotton or sponge helps hold the grease in a ball and gives the hook something to bite on.

Grease and water don’t mix well, so it takes a long time for the grease to dissolve in the water, making the bait last longer! I suggest playing around with different mix in recipes as well. powders work best, but you can add blood and other liquid agents as well.  Just don’t add too much or the grease will re-solidify without capturing it.

happy fishing!

Trying another bait….

Well, the last recipe didn’t exactly work. We were fishing faster water than normal, and the bait seemed to be disappearing from the hair rigs pretty quickly.  We switched over to a powerbait liver and started getting strikes.  I might need to adjust the hair rigs a little bit too though and try different keepers. I’ve been using the plastic bar-bell type keepers from fishing store, but I think they are pulling through on the hair-rig. I might try a piece of yarn and see if that works a little better.

Tonight we are heading out again and going to try the ol’ garlic hotdog method.  This one’s a pretty simple and tried and true catfish bait…

2 cans of vienna sausage coctail weiners (or plain old hotdogs cut up into cubes)

about 5 tablespoons of garlic salt

2 tablespoons of minced garlic

* tablespoon of Anise is optional

Basically…take the hot dogs and put them in a mason jar, add 1/2 the powdered garlic salt and the minced garlic and shake for 2 minutes.  Then add the rest of the powder and garlic, and let it sit overnight in the fridge.

You can hair-rig these, thread them on the hook, or thread them on the leader, and they should stay on.

Another boilie recipe

I made a new batch of boilies this afternoon – haven’t had a chance to try them out, but the basic boilie recipe is

1/3 cup semolina

1/3 cup sucrose

1/3 cup rice cereal (in the baby food isle)

1/3 cup milled oats (also in the baby food isle)

tablespoon or so of kosher salt

about 1/4 cup of old Feta cheese that was in the fridge

1 packet of cherry kool-aid

3 eggs

Basically, mix all the dry ingredients EXCEPT the kool-aid, then add the eggs. When it’s a “slurry” add the kool-aid and keep stirring.

I like to put my mash in the freezer before rolling it for about half hour. Helps keep it a little firmer, and easier to roll into smooth balls (not that the fish really care though.)

Notice how I DON’T use oil in the mix……rather I spray my hands with spray butter before rolling the balls.  As with any other boilie recipe, roll them into the proper size ball for your water, and boil until they float. Dry and then put them in the freezer for storage.

Also I swung into Dicks Sporting goods this week – they have an 80 sized spinning reel that will hole 250 yards of 20# line, and an 8 foot reel for $40. Might pick one up tomorrow and give it a test this weekend. I’m a light-line advocate, but recently have been losing a lot of fish, line, sinkers and everything else due to snags, and busting off the lighter weight line.  Think I’m going to jump to 17 or 18# braid and see how it goes.

Shameless plug for my wife!

Anthony Gilardi will be at the 2010 Portland Women’s Show!

Sneaking up on carp. And why, versus other fishing techniques, it’s important.

By now you’ve probably figured out that I’m a carp angler. No, not crap angler, carp. Well, most bottom feeding fish anyway, but carp, cats and sturgeon are prevalent aroudn the Pacific NW, and I used to love catching monster carp back in Upstate NY on Conesus lake when I was younger. We used to cheat though and chum the water with whole kernel corn, a practice which is frowned upon in most states now. We had good reason though – carp like corn, and corn attracts carp. A benefit is that carp will burrow looknig for the corn, and this acts as a natural seaweed removal process. But I digress….why you need to sneak up on carp.

Some carpers will tell you that you have to wear camo, well, that I don’t agree with as I’m never close enough to them, but they are skittish fish moreseo than many species. They have incredibly good “hearing” of vibrations through the water. They’ll hear you walking down a dock, or even russling leaves on a tree if it’s touching the water. Once they hear you, they bolt. They can also see “Fairly” well, although I”m pretty certain that it’s based on movement, and they can’t figure out bait.

Carp can generally see in low light better than we can (hell they live in murky water) and most of the good carp fishing is at night, so you need to figure out how to sneak up on them. I generally fish rivers now, so this isn’t an issue, and am casting lead a hundred feet or so.

More on Hair Rigging

That’s a great picture of a hair rig setup from Buckeye Bob Bernowski at www.carpecarpio.com. Bob’s got some FANTASTIC tips and tricks, and I highly recommend going and paying his site a visit. His entire writeup is available here - http://www.carpecarpio.com/carptips.html

Per Bob – the number one reason to use a hair rig for (carp especially, but catfish are the same way) is that carp taste food first, spit it out, then decide if they want to eat it or not. Using the hair rig allows the fish to suck the bait in, taste it, and spit it back out, but gives the angler the advantage of having the hook stay in the lower part of the mouth. Even if the fish doesn’t like your bait, your chances of landing the catch increase.

Here’s a hair rig setup.

More on threading hair rigs…

Take a long shanked hook and straighten it out – then put the non-barbed end into a small piece of wood, or plastic, etc. to make a handle. Simply stack your bait (IN Bob’s pictures he’s got cornmeal and foam) onto the threader, grab the loop, and slide the bait onto it.

More on fishing with boilies – Hair Rigging

The following is from Wikipedia

The hair rig is piece of fishing tackle allowing you to present baits without them sitting directly on your hook, therefore improving its efficiency. They are mainly associated with boilies but also work effectively with most other baits. The hair rig became popular in the 70's and has revolutionised carp fishing. It has been experimented with by English anglers.

At the beginning, in order to link the bait to the hook they were using some natural wire (from a ponytail). This is why they called it the 'Hair rig'. This material was very discreet but it was a little fragile. The bait also didn't act natural enough. In tests the carp only took the free offerings and left the hook bait. It was a problem because sometimes they lost their baits while they were casting. With the appearance of braided thread, this problem has been solved. Indeed, this new material allows to obtain threads which are as discreet as natural ones but more resistant.

There is one main thing to remember with boilies – you need to have a method of attaching them to the hook or lead line!

I’ll get some pictures of this next time I make up a batch, but there are a couple common things to think about when making your boilies and hooking them.

One option with making your boilies is to form the ball around a toothpick, then boil them. This forms a hole right through the middle, so you can thread your line. Another option with boilies is to use a boilie needle to pierce the boilie for threading. Me, I prefer the first option as I think it works a little better. You can, if you are really creative, even thread braided line through the boilie, THEN boil it. I’ve also been experimenting lately with taking a package of hooks, and pre-forming the boilies right onto the hook leaders. It forms a smaller boilie  ball, but makes it easy in the field – you just swap on a new hook and leader, boilie and all.

The overall goal of the hair rig is to present the bait so that the fish will take it, then spit it back out, but allow the hook to get caught in the lower part of the mouth. you don’t want more than about 1/4 to 1/2 inch between the hook and boilie.

Now for something completely different, a friend of mine has been making his boilies by making round balls, and then stacking them on a coat hanger for boiling. This gives a nice round shaft-hole through the middle, which he then feeds a loop of line through. rather than tying a knot in the loop end, he takes a small piece of toothpick, slides it through the line-loop, and pulls the boilie up against it. This makes putting new balls on really quick, and I’ve yet to see one come off in a cast. I’m in the process of making a couple of harnesses with some monifilament and epoxy so they are ready to go. At the end of the day though, just experiment.

Fishing with boilies – carp and catfish

Boilies are quickly becoming my go to bait, many times not even having to pre-chum or pre-bait the fishing waters. They’re pretty simple to make, last a while, and don’t fall apart in the water like dough balls do. Once cooked, they are also a helluva lot easier to work with as they aren’t sticky like doughballs.  Just make sure you mark the package – there are stories out there of wives mistakening them for bon-bons!

Boilies are boiled paste fishing baits, usually combinations of fishmeals, milk proteins, bird foods, semolina and soya flour, which are mixed with eggs as a binding agent and then boiled to form hardish round baits which will last in the water. Additional flavourings and attractors are also usually included in the mix. The round shape allows the baits to be catapulted accurately when fishing at range^.

Boilies are now one of the most established carp baits, available in a huge range of colours and flavours. Boilies come in all different shapes and sizes, from tiny micro boilies (some even as small as eight millimetres) up to as large as 40 mm which are more suited to waters where 'nuisance fish' are present. This keeps the little fish from pecking at your bait, letting the preferred prey work their way up.

There are buoyant boilies, commonly known as pop-ups, that are used to make the bait sit just off the bed of the lake making them easier for the fish to find and take. Pop-ups can be used in various situations, where there is weed or silt present on a lake bed, or with a normal boilie to create a 'snowman' rig, the pop-up is generally smaller than the normal boilie, this creates what is known as a critically balanced bait, or neutral buoyancy, and makes it easier for the fish to take in the bait.^[

The carp angler has an enormity of types of boiled bait to choose from, some of which have added preservatives in them so that they can be kept at room temperature on shop shelves for a long time (shelf-life bait). Boilies that lack these added preservatives need to be refrigerated or frozen to stop them from going off; these are known as freezer baits. There have been many arguments discussing the pros and cons of both freezer and shelf-life boilies but the common opinion of many carp anglers is that due to the artificial preservatives in shelf-life baits they are not as nutritionally beneficial to the carp and therefore lack some attraction. Also, since in order to keep freezer baits fresh they need to be frozen soon after being rolled, not only will the ingredients used be of a much higher quality than in shelf lives but the ingredients used to make them will not lose much of their nutrients and attraction before being used in a fishing situation (much like frozen vegetables). Due to these facts freezer baits are often much more expensive than their shelf life counterparts.

The most commonly used set-up anglers use to present a boilie is a hair rig (knotless knot) which allows the boilie to sit off the back of the hook. This not only means that the bait will behave more naturally in the water (for example when disturbed by feeding fish) it also will often make the difference between a good hook hold and a bad one. Due to the nature in which a carp feeds the bait is blown out of the mouth soon after it has been picked up and the fact that the bait can move independently from the hook it allows the hook to stay back inside the mouth and find its way preferably into the bottom lip. Hair rigs will also quickly become your friend when bottom fishing.