Here is a little tip for when your fishing on overfished waters with stock that tends to be on the shy side. Carp will learn to avoid certain baits by using different senses, sometimes they will avoid bait with a certain smell, other times they will judge a bait by its texture. Most of the time its the former, however the latter can too play a part.
Put yourself in the perspective of a carp, swimming along the bottom following your nose to a sweet smelling day-glo pop-up boilie, I like the pineapple and n-butyric from Vision. Those perfectly shaped balls of scent look mighty suspicious to clever carp. Its not often mother nature presents perfectly spherical balls of bait to carp, so its safe to assume some natural suspicion on the carps part. They will feel around the bait, unsure about its purpose, we call this “mouthing” the bait, (when a carp is not 100% sure about a bait and decides to drop it and move on.) It usually equates to a few beeps on your alarm and a little kick on the dangler.
So to try and make a bait look a bit more natural, I started chipping away the edges of boilies in an effort to make them less smooth to the touch and appear more natural. In the eyes of a carp, the bait looks like its been sat on the bottom for quite a while and other smaller fish have been nibbling away at it. It also helps to release more of the flavours from the boilie, especially when used on a pop-up.
Here is a small specimen captured using this tactic. Good luck.
