I was just chatting on the telephone to Mick Wilkinson, floatmaker extraordinaire and a member of the Marukyu field testing team. He and his fellow testers have been using some of the Marukyu baits for about a year now, so I was happy to pick his brain re what works and what doesn’t. Here, in a kind of muddled up order, are his thoughts.

The baits have mostly been tested in Roy Marlow’s Glebe Fishery.  Roy recruited some of his regular anglers to help with field testing the baits.

Mick, Roy and any of the other bait testers will tell you of days when they have caught much more than the anglers around them. Two obvious questions were “didn’t Roy invite the best anglers to be bait testers ?” to which Mick replied “of course”. I also wondered if the big weights that were being caught from the Glebe on Marukyu baits were simply because everybody was using the bait. It seems that isn’t true, the bait was only available to about 10 anglers in very limited quantities (it was all being air-freighted into the country), so it was only being used by a minority of the anglers at the venue.

Talking to Mick about the three main Marukyu ingredients he had this to say

- Nori (seaweed) is an absolutely killer bait for skimmers and tench. It got to the point that they stopped using it in Pool 1 of the Glebe because they were catching too many skimmers and not enough carp.

- Sanagi (Silkworm Pupae) is a carp attractant. They glug their hookbaits in SFA430 (Concentrated Sanagi Liquid) and the flavour seems to stay on the bait even after it has been immersed in water. You can add SFA441 (Pure Ground Sanagi) to groundbait (up to 20%) to increase the protein content.

Tanishi (Water Snails) – Are a major part of EFG140 & EFG142 groundbaits. They worked very well last year until the cold weather set in but then seemed to lose their effectiveness. That’s interesting because the Marukyu UK website suggests that EFG140 is a good cold water bait…only time will tell who is right.

Chatting to Mick, he made particular emphasis of the fact that provided you’re following the mixing instructions on the bag then each mix will be the same and you never need to riddle the groundbait. The obvious big advantage of this is that you can mix a very small amount at the bankside. It it works you can mix more and get exactly the same consistency etc and if it doesn’t work you haven’t wasted a whole bag of bait. This is a huge benefit to the match angler. There are many UK produced groundbaits that need to be mixed the day before the match, then riddled repeatedly until they are light and fluffy. Obviously, in those circumstances you’d mix enough for a red-letter day. On match day you get a bad draw and that whole mix is wasted.

Asking Mick which of the groundbaits he particularly likes, he said EFG151 as an all round groundbait, EFG131 as a feeder bait in the winter and EFG140 in the height of summer.

We then moved on to the Marukyu pellets. Your initial observation when seeing them for the first time is that they’re all different sizes and therefore will be difficult to loose feed.  The size difference is caused by the method of manufacture which is different to every other coarse pellet available in the UK. The Marukyu pellets are manufactured in a cold process whereas all of the other pellets are manufactured using an extrusion method which involves a heating process. One of the advantages of a Marukyu pellet is that the speed of release of the fish attractants is much quicker than with our normal UK pellet. The jury is still out as to whether the pellets are the right thing for feeding with a catapult. Incidentally, if you fish a lake with plenty of skimmers / bream then he strongly recommends that you try the Nori hard pellets (SDP2101 – SDP2108).

We then spoke for a while about paste fishing. The two pastes (AFP300 & AFP310) are probably like no paste you’ve ever seen before. It’s VERY IMPORTANT to mix them exactly as it says on the packet. Over mixing them will destroy their consistency and attraction. They have similar properties to bread in that when they are in the water they fluff out and become very light. At a recent trade show mick had a baited hook suspended in a tank of water. It sat their, with the paste bait attached for several hours. It was SUSPENDED i.e. not laying on the bottom and only came off when the hook was moved, similar to bread flake when it is suspended in water. This feature of the bait means that you’ll be able to fish paste in mid-water, something that’s virtually impossible with the soft pastes that we normally use. Whilst on the subject of paste, Mick also mentioned that they’ve used EFG140 groundbait mixed 1:1 to make a paste similar to the normal UK soft paste and it was very successful. They’re looking forward to some warmer weather to try it some more.

One last thing to mention, Mick was telling me that the Ground Sanagi (silkworm pupae) is prepared differently between the fine and medium grades. They are cooked in different ways and have a different flavour (similar to crushed vs grilled hemp). He says that the medium grade is also slightly higher in protein than the fine one, presumably because of the way that they are prepared differently in the factory.