stevetheangler

Well, I’m off out at the water’s side tomorrow and this morning had to mix some dry base this morning for my feed as I’d run out of my already mixed stuff….

I rarely use commercial groundbait and 99.9% of the time mix up my own – after all, its not rocket science is it?

And the base material I use, bread crumb – well, I suppose its cereal crumb really – comes from leftover loaves that have been taken for bait but never used plus old stale bread from normal household use plus other old/stale household leftovers such as biscuits, tea cakes, hot cross buns, breakfast cereals, doughnuts – in fact anything that is cereal based is dried out and blitzed and sieved and stored in 500g bags and then when I have enough to do a few bags of finished groundbait I make up my standard mix. BTW – a great item for drying out of bread and suchlike ready for the blitzing is a …. CD tower! Put bread slices, etc in the slots and they are held apart so the air can circulate and dry out quite quickly ready for the food processor to blitz…

My personal recipe:

500g Breadcrumb (Bulking agent)
250g Lightly ground/cracked shell birdseed (To create an active g’bait)
250g Blitzed Vitalin (Feed particles)
150g Blood/Bone/Fishmeal Mix (Attractors)
150g Whole Porage Oats  (Feed particles)
135g Strong White Flour (Binder)
75g Salt (Flavour enhancer)

And that gives me a 1.5Kg in total ‘single session portion’…

I did, at one time, also add 100g of sugar as a sweetener but I found that the results when using this sugared version were far inferior to the unsugared original and so that has been removed from my mix these days.

Birdseed – active groundbait ingredient – the lightly blitzed seeds are cracked so that water can ingress the shells and wet the inner flour – this causes the flour to swell and ‘pop’ the shell open and so causes a sound attraction due to the popping and also causes the seeds/flour puffs to rise and fall in the water creating a visual attraction too.

Strong White Flour – well, it can be any strong flour really. Cornflour, wholemeal, etc. I like my groundbait to sink quickly and remain mainly as a ball until it reaches the bottom and only then to start disintegrating. Its easy enough to wet more than usual to create a sloppy cloud type effect anyway if that is needed. I’m of the opinion that fish will be held longer if there is actual food material available rather than a ‘hint’ of it… Analogy: Indian restaurant with divine smells emanating from the doorway – you enter and find the smell is just from an aerosol, do you stay? But enter and find tables full of tureens brimming with curries, etc, do you leave?

Other items – well, as described….

At the waterside I also add particles (hemp/wheat/rice/corn) as desired plus at times small meat pieces, prawn pieces and other samples of the intended hookbaits for the day – and a good dose of maggots too… and also I have a liking to colour my groundbait and to do so I use strong powder food dyes (liquid supermarket ones are far too weak I find), 1 level teaspoon of the dye being added to the mixing water pre-wetting of the mix. I carry small sachets of black, chocolate brown, lemon yellow, egg yellow, electric green, pink and red … and have a personal preference for the green and red colours.