5 REASONS WHY…

MARC COULSON reckons it’s one of the best baits out there… it’s certainly one of the oldest baits in carp fishing and remains hugely effective.

One: It’s Cheap

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but yeah, bread is as cheap as it gets when it comes to carp baits. Depending on how you’re using it, you really don’t need to buy anything more than your local supermarket’s own-brand stuff. Just plain old white is all you need too, none of that fancy-Dan seeded brown nonsense!

Two: Versatility

There are so many ways to use bread that it must rank as, maybe even more so than boilies, the most versatile of carp baits.

Straight from the bag bread can be used as a brilliant stalking bait, both on the hook and as freebies flicked into the margins. Obviously there are several ways in which you can use a crust or even an entire slice of bread as a surface bait and it can also be liquidised and used in a PVA stick – probably my favourite carp tactic of all, especially on waters where the carp have ‘seen it all before.’

Sloppy bread mixed with lots of water can be a great bait for clouding up the water when zig fishing a white hook bait and crumb can be used to cheaply bulk out more expensive groundbaits. The list goes on.

You can even flavour and colour bread, but you don’t really need to given that the visual nature of white bread is one of its inherent attractors anyway.

Three: It’s Easy To Use And Keep

Okay, bread will go stale in time, but that doesn’t always render it useless as, sometimes, the slightly stale stuff is better for some uses. As I’ve mentioned, I love to blend bread in a liquidiser and often the freshest stuff isn’t so good for this as it is too soft.

Four: Carp Love It

There is no denying the effectiveness of bread as a carp bait – they do literally love the stuff. In the right circumstances a floating crust can outfish any of the modern surface-bait alternatives such as mixers or pellets.

Five: You Can Eat It Too!

As you can probably tell from any recent photographs of me in the magazine, I don’t miss many meals and, as well as a nice cold beer, a huge weakness of mine is bread. It’s not unknown for me to run out of bread on a session as I’ve stolen the odd mouthful of the fluffy stuff or the crust while feeding surface-slurping carp.

In reverse of that, I’ve used bits of my sandwich to catch carp before, when all other baits have been failing, so it cuts both ways.