Robin Red is one of the most successful carp bait additives in the history of carp fishing! It is a true winter winner though and used now in readymade and homemade baits all year round too! How can you exploit this amazing carp catcher best to get better and better big carp catches in winter and all year round? More is revealed here to stimulate those carp senses so read on now!
Robin Red is a dark red powder originally formulated to improve health and plumage colouration of birds. But it has loads of controversy, myth and legend attached to it due to its exceptional carp catching powers! Within this mysterious mixture of sweet, spicy seedy, sugar sweet and red oily factors and elements are the secrets to an astonishing history of carp catches going right back as far as the mid-sixties. Among carp fishing bait ingredients or additives, Robin Red ranks in many anglers top ten, yet there are many anglers that have never ever used it who do not realise what they can do with it to improve their catches!
Two of the first anglers known to have been developing the use of Robin Red in the context of carp fishing baits and extraordinary catches were Ian Booker and John Holt. Many other anglers including Rod Hutchinson were to spread the advantages of using Robin Red as part of their baits, especially in the making of boilies. The distinctive rod colouration of the hands when fishing with Robin Red boilies was a signal to fellow anglers of what you were using, even though in the early days of carp fishing pioneering robin red was part of the cult of carp bait secrecy!
Robin red has been discussed, argued about, and generally thrown about as a subject for debate ever since it became more widely known because anglers really wanted to know what its secrets of success were. It seems that possibly the recipe might have changed, perhaps due to EU legislation perhaps but some think the recipe is not exactly as it was. But even so, the recipe is similar enough today for me to think it very much the same product that I first used at the start of the eighties.
Getting hold of Robin Red is easy enough and one of the most economical licensed suppliers is CC Moore. Many bait companies use this outstanding ingredient in at least one of the baits in their readymade bait range and certainly the CC Moore Meteor readymade bait is a mix that has caught endless big carp over the years including an old Rainbow Lake record, and I for one have been making versions of homemade baits for many decades using Robin red and more recently adapting and altering CC Moore Meteor to tailor it towards my own lines of bait design principles and internal and external functions and optimizations.
One of the things you first notice about Robin Red is how similar it smells to paprika, and the molasses content is very noticeable too. Both I have used to great effect especially in low water temperatures, and indeed Robin red is a legendary winter bait additive. Robin red was originally so associated with winter and cold temperatures that most anglers I knew in the early eighties in the north Kent and south Essex only changed over to exploiting Robin Red around the middle of October dependent upon how fast temperatures dropped off and frosts approached!
The two factors of cold weather and Robin Red were intertwined and in time with experimentation we homemade bait makers realised that this spicy sweet additive was actually very good at any time of year! This was a time before readymade boilies became available in fishing shops and personal experimentation was a key part of personal fishing success.
In fact for me this journey never stopped right up to this day, as the advantages of actually knowing for certain what a bait is composed of and knowing why and how to truly optimise and maximise a bait for particular conditions and seasons of the year is just so incredibly important to maximizing your success!
Anglers using readymade baits without developing this first hand knowledge are simply blind regarding bait and are fishing on faith without knowing how to better the bait they have bought!
Being a homemade bait maker is not for me about choosing a mixture and how many eggs go into a mix. What matters to me are factors that the fish all tell me, in relation to 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 notable 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 get unique edges over well known and established commercial food baits.
This additive is often used in readymade baits at low inclusion rates, because that way a company can call their bait Red this or that and state it includes this renowned additive, without necessarily putting much in at all! To me this is not a beneficial situation for those that for whatever reasons do not make their own baits!
The fact is that there is a world of difference in catch results between making a winter homemade 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 chilli can be over powering due to the ever so potent micro-elements they contain so the balance is critical.
I have made baits with too many spices which have made bait repellant, and only testing will identify maximum levels if you create your own spices mixtures and I test all my baits very rigorously indeed! With Robin Red if you use 100 to 200 grams per kilogram in boilie bait recipes you can be certain you have not over powered your bait and have easily enough of this additive to make all the difference! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!
By Tim Richardson.