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Barbel boiled baits back when?

Darren George

Darren George

Senior Member
Hi guys,

Just wondering if anyone can shed any light on the early days of using boilies for barbel.

Were they effective from day one or was prebaiting required?
Did different base's have a bearing on how quickly they were accepted?
Was Fishmeal always the most popular option?
 
Darren, Tony Miles was one of the pioneers and he talks about it in great detail in his book: Elite Barbel
 
Darren George said:
Thanks Ian, it's on my Christmas list actually.

In the meantime, I wonder if there are any other views..
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Ian Welch has also written a fair bit on this subject, in particular when it was being pioneered on the Kennet.

Elite barbel is a terrific book with a great insight into this fascinating subject and also illustrates just how hard Tony Miles worked for those incredible Kickles barbel.
 
Ian Crook said:
Darren, Tony Miles was one of the pioneers and he talks about it in great detail in his book: Elite Barbel
Click to expand...

Beg to differ on that one Ian but no he wasn't and i'm sure he'll tell you as much, Fred Wilton and his boys were way ahead of everyone else when it came to Boiled baits and HNV'S for barbel, the people to answer this question are The Kent lads, messers Monday,Morris ETC.
 
If you want to find out about the real pioneers of boilie fishing for barbel you need to be looking in the direction of Fred Wilton and co. That would be around 1985 onwards and would have been done using milk proteins. Bob Morris may have written about it somewhere but I don't think Fred ever did... and yes they would have been doing plenty of pre-baiting.
 
:D Massively influential was Fred, i always thought it a shame that he stood back and let others take the credit for his work/thinking, but aint that the way nowadays :rolleyes: I remember bumping into him in the woods at Sandy Balls on the Hants Avon one night, (An unpleasant thing at the best of times :D:D) he was chucking in these huge yellow balls, upon asking the question, "A sort of paste" was all i got :) Mid 80's bout right.
 
boilies for barbel

I cannot claim credit for pioneering boilies for barbel fishing. I first used boiled baits on the Cherwell in 1991 but it wasn't until I really got into my Ouse fishing in 1993 that they became my bait of choice.
 
Twenty or so years ago I was in the Barbel Catchers along with guys like Tony, Tref and Ray Walton.

The Wealden Region were the first I knew of to be using boilies ( From Fred Wilton) and they had great success on a number of rivers.
It caused all sorts of discussion at the London Region meetings back in those days.

I often wonder what it would have been like if there had been forums back then because it really did cause all sorts of furore!

Steve Carden who I bumped into recently and who posts on here knows far more than me as he was in that region back then.

Unless others were pioneering in different parts of the country and kept it quiet I think its generally accepted that this is how it all began.

It may have even prompted Simon to wear an infamous teeshirt on the front page of Anglers Mail, still have it somewhere!
 
Yes Steve its in a drawer under my bed, its a little on the 'Snug' side nowadays though :)

Not sure if i remember correctly but didn't Dave Williams break the then record on one of/or a similar bait to Freds ?
As Chris says, they were all Milk based and had very little flavour/smell, Lemon was one of his first i think, he always told me that if you could smell the flavour then there was too much in ! worth remembering that ;)
 
Know what you mean about teeshirts under the bed!!

Dave was the man back then, I wonder if he's still fishing these days. He had a phenomenal catch of three fourteens in a week or something like that, Ray will remember.
He was part of the same group, had good catches on the Lea as well.

There's another guy who was at the Barbel Show a couple of years ago when Len Arbery did his talk and presentation to Bob Buteau and I wish I could remember his name, little fella, but he used Fred's bait on the Wye and Severn and had amazing catches.
Was well known on the carp scene as well.
 
I remember chatting with Fred at Johnsons back in the 80's and he was talking about 'red' which was one of his earlier baits. What was the flavour in that, I asked? He said it was a Japanese food additive used in soups, that I wouldn't have heard of... What, miso, I asked? Yeah that's it, he replied!
 
I can claim to having first caught (Kennet) barbel on boilies in 1984, courtesy of Pete Springate and Kenny Hodder and particularly the nameless guy, a pal of theirs and mine, a genius carp-fisher, who stocked Colne Mere just as much as Pete and Kenny did. In 1983 I had helped him and his girlfriend spend several months in India fishing in my footsteps, and when they came back, penniless as I had been on return in the late 1970s, I said "Come and my live in my spare room in Old Windsor.". They did, stayed a year or so, and did he and I do some fishing, And did he do some bait-making in my kitchen (kitchen cupboards full of big jars and containers of Casein, Sodium Caseinate, Calcium Caseinate, Whey, semolina and food flavourings), for the water he was fishing completely alone then (Colne Mere) - boilies. Lots of boilies. I was barbelling (as well as trout and grayling flyfishing the upper waters of) the Kennet a lot at that time - with trout-pellet paste, meat paste, fish paste, corn very occasionally (it had blown several years earlier), meat, worm, maggots, casters and hemp superglued to 1lb mono (not hair-rigged but tied to the eye and twisted round a wide-gape hook).

"Why don't you try my bait for barbel?" he said one evening as he, his girlfriend and I sat in my little living room in front of a 'vid'.

I did and caught three fish, to eight pounds (Newbury area), then I moved to Wales in late 1986 and stopped barbelling for several years (salmon in Wales, more Indian mahseer, two trips after Goliath...) and never gave boilies for barbel another thought until the Roger Baker boom of the 1990s.

Full circle.


PS - Remember that south Indian fishers have been using rock-hard boiled and steamed paste baits (made from ragi millet flour) for hundreds and hundreds of years. We had both used them by the ton on the the Kaveri...
 
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Chris Turnbull said:
I remember chatting with Fred at Johnsons back in the 80's and he was talking about 'red' which was one of his earlier baits. What was the flavour in that, I asked? He said it was a Japanese food additive used in soups, that I wouldn't have heard of... What, miso, I asked? Yeah that's it, he replied!
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Any time spent talking to Fred was worth having :) i remember him once helping me out with my bait on the Road lake, i had spent ages in the close season getting this neutural bouyancy HNV sorted out, perfect in the kitchen but making it up on the bank (remember that? ) the bloody stuff floated :( turned out it was down to a batch variance in one of the ingredients,never mind, he sorted it for me and having obviously been told what was in it i got a pat on the head and told i could throw as much of it in 'his' lake as i liked! heady praise indeed :)
I also remember the bolloking i got 2 years later when out of sheer laziness i turned up with a box of Ritchworth shelf lifes :D
 
I agree, Matt, I take boilies and the bits that go in them for granted. It's great to read of a time not so long ago when it was all just an idea..

Full circle indeed, Paul. It's funny how things run in cycles, even such things as popular fish baits or methods.

I often wonder if a sparingly applied milk-pro approach is worth revisiting, especially on pellet or meat dominated stretches.

I almost plucked up the stones two years ago but ended up cutting the mix with yellow birdfood and a touch of low-temp Fishmeal...
 
Simon. Yeah, the dreaded shelf-lifes. Despite your bollocking, wasn't that the season you had that brace of '9's' in 'Redletter Days', plus I had a '9' from the Railway and a 20lb carp and Skid had three 20lb carp.... all caught on the same shelf-life baits?.... Meanwhile all the carpers could manage that week was one carp between them.... despite all their pukka hi-pro offerings.
 
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