This is the least glamorous article in this series and probably the most useful. Nobody talks about bait preparation, and it accounts for more ruined sessions than tackle failure does.
Particles: this one actually matters for fish welfare
Dry particles like hemp, maize, tigers and beans absorb water and swell. If a fish eats them before they have finished swelling, they continue swelling inside it. That is a genuine welfare problem and it is why preparation is not optional.
The process is straightforward. Soak the particles in cold water for around 24 hours, then boil them until they are fully cooked and soft, then let them cool in their own liquid. Hemp is ready when the shells split and the white shoot shows. Tigers need a longer soak and a proper boil, and they need to be genuinely soft rather than merely warm.
Do not shortcut the soak by boiling from dry. It does not achieve the same thing.
Keep the liquid. It is full of attraction and can go in with your feed. Our particle baits guide and hemp guide go further on individual baits.
Maggots
Maggots want to be cool, dry and lightly covered. A ventilated bait box with fresh maize meal or sawdust, kept in a fridge or a cool shed, will hold them in good condition for a couple of weeks.
Riddle them off and refresh the maize regularly. Maggots sitting in their own ammonia go off fast and fish notice.
If you want casters, leave maggots at room temperature and riddle off the ones that have turned, several times a day. Casters need to go into water or a sealed bag once they have turned or they will keep developing.
Do not put maggots in the fridge your household eats from without a conversation first. I say this from experience.
Worms
A wormery or a bucket of damp compost in a cool dark place, fed with vegetable scraps. Lobworms collected off a lawn will keep for weeks in damp moss in the fridge.
Keep them damp, not wet. Standing water kills them.
Boilies and pellets
Shelf life boilies keep as sold. Freezer baits need to stay frozen and should go into a cool bag for the session rather than sitting in the sun for eight hours.
Air-drying freezer baits is worth doing if you are going away for several days. Spread them out on a towel or in a bait bag for a day or two and they will keep without a freezer, at the cost of some attraction.
Pellets need to stay completely dry until you use them. A bag of pellets that has taken on damp turns into a solid block, and there is no rescuing it.
The night before
Prepare bait the night before, not on the morning of the session. Particles need time. Pastes are easier to make in a kitchen than in a car park in the dark.
Portion it out into the containers you will actually fish from, so you are not decanting maggots into a bait box with cold hands at half past five.
Biosecurity
Do not move fish between waters, do not take unused live fish bait from one venue to another, and dry your nets and unhooking mat between trips.
Invasive species and disease move on damp kit, and the effort of drying a net is nothing against the cost of introducing something into a water. There is more on this in our rules and law section.
Dan Whitfield started fishing aged seven on the canal at the end of his road and never really stopped. He spent his twenties and thirties on the match circuit – club level rather than national – before deciding he’d rather catch one decent fish than a net of small ones.
These days he mostly fishes the River Trent for barbel (personal best 14lb 2oz), the Oxford Canal for roach and skimmers in winter, and the occasional gravel pit when tench are spawning and the surface fishing is too good to miss. He’s a former club secretary and still helps with junior coaching at his local angling club in Nottingham.
At The River Bend, Dan writes the coarse species guides, river fishing technique articles, and the match and pole content.
Covers: Barbel, bream, roach, tench, carp (coarse context), river fishing, canal fishing, feeder, float, match/pole