How to make homemade winter carp baits and irresistible Robin Red Boilies!
Robin Red is one of the most successful carp bait additives in carp fishing history! However, it is a real winter winner and is now also used in homemade and ready-to-use baits year-round! How can you best exploit this amazing carp catcher for better and better big carp catches in winter and year round? More is revealed here to stimulate your carp’s senses, so read on now!
Robin Red is a dark red powder originally formulated to improve the health and coloration of bird plumage. But it has a lot of controversy, myth and legend due to its exceptional carp catching powers! Within this mysterious mix of sweet, spicy, seed-based, sugar candy and red oily factors and elements lie the secrets to an amazing history of carp catching dating back to the mid-1960s. Among ingredients or additives for carp fishing baits, Robin Red is in the top ten of many anglers, however there are many anglers who have never used it and don’t realize what they can do with it to improve their catches.
Two of the earliest anglers known to have developed the use of Robin Red in the context of baits for carp and big catch fishing were Ian Booker and John Holt. Many other anglers, including Rod Hutchinson, would spread the word about the benefits of using Robin Red as part of their baits, especially when making boilies. The distinctive color of the rod in your hands when fishing with Boilies Robin Red was a signal to fellow anglers what you were using, although in the early days of carp fishing pioneer Robin Red was part of the cult of secrecy! of carp baits!
Robin Red has been talked about, talked about, and generally brought up as a topic of debate ever since it became more well known because anglers really wanted to know what the secrets to its success were. It seems that the recipe may have changed, perhaps due to EU legislation, but some feel that the recipe is not exactly what it was. But still, the recipe is similar enough today that I think it’s very similar to the same product I first used in the early eighties.
Getting hold of Robin Red is quite easy and one of the cheapest licensed providers is CC Moore. Many bait companies use this exceptional ingredient in at least one of the baits in their range of ready to use baits and indeed CC Moore Meteor ready to use bait is a mix that has caught countless large carp throughout the ages. over the years, including an old Rainbow Lake record, and me for one. I have been making versions of homemade baits for many decades using Robin Red and most recently adapted and altered CC Moore Meteor to fit my own lines of bait design principles and functions and internal and external optimizations.
One of the first things you notice about Robin Red is how similar it smells to paprika, and the molasses content is also very noticeable. I have used both to great effect, especially in low water temperatures, and in fact Robin Red is a legendary winter bait additive. Robin red was originally so associated with winter and low temperatures that most anglers I met in the early 1980s in North Kent and South Essex only switched to fishing for Robin Red in mid-October, depending! how fast temperatures dropped and frost approached!
The two factors of cold weather and Robin Red became intertwined and over time, with experimentation, we homebait makers realized that this sweet spicy additive was actually very good any time of the year. This was a time before ready-to-use boilies were available in fishing stores and personal experimentation was a key part of personal fishing success.
In fact, for me, this journey has never stopped to this day, as the advantages of knowing for sure what a bait is made of and knowing why and how to really optimize and maximize a bait for particular conditions and seasons of the year it’s just so incredibly important to maximizing your success!
Anglers who use off-the-shelf baits without developing this first hand knowledge are simply blind to the bait and are fishing in faith without knowing how to improve the bait they have purchased!
Being a home bait maker is not for me about choosing a mix and how many eggs go into a mix. What matters to me are the factors that all fish tell me, regarding their internal and external processes and much more, and how to induce feeding even when conditions and fish metabolism seem at odds with feeding. This is where the remarkable aspects of Robin Red are significant to me and I have often used this additive as a starting point for developing bait additives and baits of my own design, to gain unique advantages over well known and established commercial food baits.
This additive is often used in ready-to-use baits with low inclusion rates, because that way a company can call their bait Red so-and-so and claim to include this renowned additive, without necessarily putting much at all! For me, this is not a win-win situation for those who, for whatever reason, do not make their own baits!
The fact is, there is a huge difference in catch results between making a homemade winter bait using as little as 25 grams of Robin Red, compared to using 100 or 200 grams in a kilogram of base mix! Pepper and chili can be overwhelming due to the very potent trace elements they contain, so balance is critical.
I have made baits with too many spices that have made them repellent, and only tests will identify the maximum levels if you create your own spice blends and I test all my baits very rigorously! With Robin Red, if you use 100-200 grams per kilogram in boilie bait recipes, you can be sure that you haven’t overloaded your bait and have enough of this additive to make a difference. Revealed in my exclusive eBooks of Homemade Prepared Bait Catfish and Carp Bait Secrets is much more powerful information. Look out for my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my bio below for details on my ebook deals right now!
By Tim Richardson.