A comparison of the different types of boilies used for carp fishing - pop-ups, wafters and bottom baits - and how to use them

As carp anglers we pay a lot of attention to the colour and flavour of the boilies that we use, especially when it comes to hookbaits, but often just as important is how buoyant they are and where they sit in relation to the lake bed.

Whilst it is flavour/attractors and colour that tend to attract to attract carp to a hookbait from a longer distance away, once they get close to it or even take the bait into their mouth, buoyancy can play a much bigger part – even with a pop-up, it is likely that it is only once a carp gets fairly close to it that it probably even notices that the bait isn’t on the bottom.

How buoyant your hookbait is makes a big difference in terms of choosing what type of rig to use, and what sort of bottom it is appropriate for presenting over, and no one type of boilie hookbait is the answer to everything.

On most waters there will definitely be times of year when brightly coloured pop-ups will outfish everything else, but there will also be other periods when a match-the-hatch bottom bait straight out of the bag will be producing most of the bites, and it is more than just colour, as a duller coloured pop-up also isn’t as effective.

So, it makes sense to be familiar with all different types of boilie hookbaits – pop-ups, wafters, balanced baits, and bottom baits - when to fish them and with what rigs, and how to get the best from them.

Pop-up carp bait boilies

Often pop-ups are brightly coloured or highly flavoured, to make them really stand out from any other bait around them, with the idea being that hopefully they get picked up more quickly by the carp, which actively home in on them in preference to your freebies.

They can also be exactly the same colour and flavour as all your freebies though, and work just as well, with the fact that they are fished an inch or two off of the bottom being enough to make them stand out from everything around them. Pop-ups are buoyant baits that float and are used to present a hook bait above weed or silt for better visibility, or even over a clear bottom to achieve a specific type of presentation.

Pop-ups do of course also have the advantage that they hold your hook completely clear of the bottom, so if there is debris such as silkweed, leaf litter or similar – or even thick weed if fishing them on a chod rig which settles on top – then it can get caught on the hook end of your rig, which is left completely clear to take hold in the mouth of any carp which picks up your bait.

How far your bait is popped up off of the bottom all depends on the presentation you are trying to achieve, and is typically one to three inches, although that often depends on your rig choice, and with pop-ups on Ronnie rigs typically fished much closer to the lakebed than those being used on a hinge stiff rig, where the bait is very obviously popped up clear of the deck.

That is of course with standard rigs, but pop-ups are also used because of their buoyancy for things such as zig rigs, where the bait is fished mid-water, or even for floater fishing on the surface where the hookbait needs to float.

How buoyant your pop-ups are will depend on what they are made from, as well as their size, and you really want baits that are consistent as well as being able to retain that buoyancy even after being immersed in water for a long period of time – ideally you want your pop-ups to have the same amount of buoyancy 24 hours later, as when you first cast them out, so you can confidently leave your rigs out for longer periods of time if you need to. A pop-up that soaks up lots of water and starts to sink after a while isn’t much use, especially if you have set up your rig on the basis of it being buoyant!

You are also going to need to counterbalance your pop-up hook bait with some sort of weight to set how far above the lakebed it sits – otherwise it would be popped up the whole length of your hook link. This means adding a shot, lump of putty such as the Dark Matter Putty, or the Korda tungsten Dark Matter Balancing Weights (designed to fit onto the barrel of a spinner swivel).

How much weight you add depends on the presentation that you want to achieve, and whether you want your hook bait to barely sink, which can be good if there is lots of debris or low lying weed and you are looking for it to just settle lightly on top of that.

At the other end of the scale you might be looking to over-balance your pop-up by actually adding more weight than is needed to sink it, and with the idea being that it stays nailed to the lakebed when a carp approaches and moves the water near it.

As we have seen on the Korda Underwater videos, carp can be very wary sometimes of baits that move around, and so could be spooked by a pop-up that wafts up well off of the bottom when they approach it. Although it is also true with pop-ups, that however you weight them there will still be movement, as even over-weighted presentations will still wobble around, even if they don’t actually lift up off the bottom like a more balanced bait would do.

There is plenty of choice when it comes to the size of pop-ups, and these days where they are being used on their own purely as a pop-up, anglers tend to go for smaller baits, somewhere around 13-14mm, which tends to be the minimum size that has enough buoyancy to lift up all your rig components on the hook, and especially if using something like a Ronnie rig.

There might be situations though where you need a bigger pop-up, such as when there are lots of smaller nuisance species, or when you are using a pop-up in conjunction with a bottom bait, for a snowman presentation.

There are loads of different pop-up rigs, including everything from a very simple knotless knot with a braided hook link and a shot pinched on to balance the bait, right through to far more complicated rigs like a 360 or hinged stiff rig style of presentation.

The type of rig you choose will in part depend on how far off of the lakebed you want your hookbait to sit, as rigs such as the Ronnie or spinner lend themselves to fishing lower lying pop-ups closer to the bottom than you can achieve with some other rigs.

You also have different variations such as the KD rig, which is totally different to most pop-up rigs in that the hook sits on the lakebed, and the counterbalance shot is pinched onto the hair, again ensuring the pop-up is very close to the bottom.

Which type of rig you decide to use will largely come down to personal preference and what you have confidence in, as well as the angling situation, and a Ronnie is a great all-round option – anglers such as Tom Dove use this for most of their fishing and have total confidence in it.

Wafter boilie baits are popular with modern carp anglers

Wafter have been a more recent addition to the type of boilie hook baits that we use, and to all intents and purpose, they are basically a pop-up that is less buoyant, certainly in terms of how the bait itself behaves anyway.

They are basically a bait that will float, just about, on its own, but where the addition of a hook and other rig bits are enough to cause it to sink and sit on the bottom, so there is no need for any additional counter-weights.

As the name suggests, this type of bait, although sinking, is still buoyant enough that it can waft around - such as when a carp swims past it – which may get its attention, but can also spook fish as well. A wafter will usually sit slightly off of the bottom, depending on the type of rig and components used.

The other big advantage it has is that when a carp sucks it in, the wafter is far more buoyant than the fish is expecting, and so goes into its mouth much easier, and also might cause it to bolt out of surprise, potentially increasing the chances of hooking it. There is also an argument that a buoyant bait is harder for the fish to eject once it has taken it inside its mouth, and thus increases the chances of getting a hook hold.

Wafter comes in all different sizes, shapes, colours, and flavours, so whether you are looking for a bright, highly flavoured , round one; or something that matches your freebies in both colour and flavour, and is dumbbell shaped, then you will likely be able to find something that fits your requirements – most bait companies these days produce wafters as well as pop-ups to match their baits.

Wafters can be very effective where you want something slow sinking and fairly buoyant, but where the hook bait is still almost touching the lake bed, albeit sat up by the length of whatever has been used to attach it to the rig, and depending how it balances – on a standard knotless knot rig with a wafter, the hook would be lying on the bottom, with the wafter sitting up off the bottom by however long your hair is.

This type of hookbait is incredibly popular with anglers, and is very easy to fish with as there is no need to even counter balance it, plus it can be used with loads of different rigs.

A wafter is the perfect choice for Ronnie rigs and many combi rigs, such as Darrell Peck’s Combi Multi, as well as with more traditional set ups like Danny Fairbrass’ IQ D-rig, and is a very versatile choice of hookbait that will work over most types of lake bed and at any time of the year.

Balanced bottom baits are still highly effective

Balanced bottom baits have been around for a lot longer than wafters, and instead of them being a less buoyant pop-up, like a wafter is, these are basically a bottom bait that is a bit more buoyant.

This can be achieved when the bait is made, such as by adding cork dust but not enough to make the boilie float, or afterwards by drilling out the bait and adding some cork or foam – something that anglers have been doing for years with other baits such as tiger nuts.

The idea being that this type of hook bait is basically still a bottom bait, and will sit on the lakebed, but has a little more buoyancy than your freebies.

The reason for that is so that it basically counteracts the weight of the hook, and when a carp picks the bait up it doesn’t feel any heavier than your freebies. So very much along the same lines as a wafter, just in a slightly different way and giving you a hook bait that sits flush to the lake bed and isn’t buoyant enough that it will move around noticeably more than any other baits around it.

There are plenty of situations where this is an advantage, and especially where the carp have grown wary of baits that move around a lot or are sitting above the lakebed, which can happen when they’ve been fished for a lot with wafters or pop-ups.

Balanced bottom baits are a favourite of Danny Fairbrass in certain situations, and especially later in the season once the fish have been hammered on brightly coloured hookbaits throughout the spring. You will often see him in Masterclass and Thinking Tackle videos using a Korda Bait Drill to bore out standard boilies, such as Mainline Cell, straight out of the bag and plugging  the hole with a bit of 6mm cork stick, which adds enough buoyancy, but the bait will still sink on its own.

A wide variety of different rigs are suitable for fishing with balanced bottom baits and basically include any of the popular rigs that anglers typically use with either wafters or bottom baits – this includes the Ronnie rig, which Dan himself favours, as well as all sorts of combi rig variations, D-rigs, multi rigs, and pretty much any type of presentation that isn’t designed solely to be used with pop-ups.

They are a great option where you want your hookbait to look exactly the same as all the other baits around it, and the only difference being it is slightly more buoyant to allow for the weight of your rig components and to balance that out.

 Carp boilie bottom baits

These days, using a standard boilie bottom bait straight out of the bag, and exactly the same as all your freebies, with no added buoyancy, is probably an under-used tactic compared to how people have carp fished over the years.

This tactic can be very effective still though, and especially so where fish have seen lots of brighter or more buoyant hook baits, and have become wary of them – such as on busy day ticket waters, and this tactic is a favourite of Korda Koach Rob Burgess at certain times of the year. Bottom bait hook baits are sinking boilies designed to rest on the lake bed and are best used on a clean or hard bottom.

Because so few anglers tend to fish like this, certainly on some waters, it can be a real edge to make sure your hook bait doesn’t stand out.  That may sound counter-intuitive, when so much of modern carp fishing focuses on trying to get fish to pick up your hook bait before any others, and we often go out of our way to make our hook baits more colourful or flavourful than anything else in the swim.

The biggest drawback with this tactic is that you relying on a fair amount of chance, in terms of how quickly your bait gets picked up as the carp eat all the freebies in your swim, and given that they all look exactly the same and there is no good reason why any particular bait should get picked up before any others. So, there is a large degree of luck involved in whether your bait is the first to be eaten, the last, or somewhere inbetween.

You can of course try to influence that by the way that you bait up, as well as when it comes to where on the baited area you place your rigs – in the middle of it or on the edges, for instance - and those factors can vary from session to session, depending on how the carp are feeding, as well as the routes they are taking to approach your baited spot.

When it comes to the type of boilie you use and the size - they are typically available in sizes ranging from 8mm to 26mm, or even larger in some cases - there is loads of choice, and both freezer and shelf-life boilies can be effective (but have different storage requirements). Freezer baits contain lots of active fresh ingredients that make them more attractive in water, and they typically include base ingredients such as fishmeal, milk proteins, bird foods, semolina, soya flour.

Whilst shelf-life boilies are preserved and do not need to be stored in a freezer, and although nutritional value can vary significantly, affecting their effectiveness when it comes to attracting carp, modern shelf-lifes such as the Mainline range are much better than in the past. You will often see anglers such as Danny Fairbrass mixing two different boilie flavours or types so he can keep the fish guessing and increase his chances of catching. Using high quality carp fishing baits, such as Cell or Iso Fish, from the Mainline boilie range, will increase your catch rate andf sometimes also pick out the bigger fish or those that don't get caught often.

There are definitely rigs that tend to work best with bottom baits, and which actually rely on the weight of the boilie when the hook link tightens, to help the hook flip over in the mouth and find a hold in the bottom lip. One such rig is what became known as the flipper rig, but has been around for years and basically involves trapping the hair with a piece of silicone somewhere around the bend, which makes it flip over aggressively.

Anglers fishing bottom baits also tend to favour other presentations, often based around a knotless knot, and including mechanics such as line aligners or blowback set ups.

Different spots and lakebeds

A big factor in the type of boilie hookbait that you decide to use will be the type of lakebed that you are fishing over, and sometimes your choice will be dictated by that, or a specific rig that is best suited to the angling situation you find yourself in.

If you are fishing on an area that has some debris, such as leaf litter or weed, and sometimes that is the best option available, especially in lakes that are full of thick weed and where a sparser area is the closest to a clear spot that you can find, you want to be fishing a bait and rig that you know is definitely giving your hookbait a chance of being found, picked up, and then your rig actually working.

There could be times though where rather than fishing over the top of something, you want to be fishing right in it, such as a bloodworm bed in silt, and where you want your bait hard on the bottom.

So whilst it pays to be aware of all the different types of boilie hook bait options, and you will have your personal favourites presentation – some anglers love fishing pop-ups and that is mainly what they use, for instance – you also need to take account of what is in front of you and how the carp will be feeding.

Baiting strategy

How you are baiting and what with will also be a big factor in deciding what type of boilie hook baits to use – obviously making the assumption that you will fish a boilie of some sort.

If you are fishing a tighter bed of bait, introduced via a spod, or even just a solid PVA bag, then you may well want your hookbait to really stand out or to be buoyant, increasing the chances of it being sucked in by a feeding carp. That can especially be the case if you are fishing over beds of particles or smaller items of food, which the fish can get preoccupied on.

In other situations though, such as when baiting with just boilies, via a throwing stick, then a bottom bait or balanced bottom bait can make far more sense, due to the way the carp are feeding, and where they should happily pick up a bait that looks and behaves just like all the others they encounter in that area.

So don’t just blindly chuck out the same rig and bait every time, and do think about why you are using it and whether there might be a better option in that situation.