FishOn Ricci, Scopex/Pineapple S2 balanced tipped with fake maggots. Great photo









Forum member Ash, white S2. He did not say how big, but the common looks a chunk.





David, brace 30's Cherry Cola S2





Russ, Hutchie S2 & GPB2 over Essential B5





Lee, GPB2 over Trap Baits freezers

In reply to Post #77
Hi all I'm thinking of buying a few pots of the cc popups and was just wondering which are the most popular for the winter months to be used as singles?
Cheers

In reply to Post #78
Any of them. You will not go wrong with the standard S2. If the standard S2 has been used a lot on your lake, pick one of the new special S2.

The lad Russ below was one of the first to have the Scopex/Pineapple S2 along with Ricci. He was given them early last January. Russ does one night a week normally. That turns into a day in the winter. The results he had on a no publicity venue in Essex last winter were nothing short of incredible. On a lake where five a year is considered a great year. He absolutely rinsed the place in a couple of months in Jan/Feb/March. His results were so out of the ordinary, he was actually asked/accused if he was using hormones at one point.

He caught the biggest and most desirable fish twice within weeks at the coldest time of the year. All of the other bigguns except just one.

2014, beach swim Weybridge/Wey. Special old Thames fish. A great example of what happens when people are setting fixed long lines to snare the carp. I used to pull out loads of them. Wooden peg/stake in the ground, long length of strong mono with a stone/rock attached along with baited double or treble hooks. Often just plastic corn left on by the time I dragged them out. It was clearly the same bloke or blokes doing it. A couple of us tried our very best to catch him/them too. When we could not catch them we started leaving very threatening letters where the snares were set, trying to stop them. It got to the stage where I would walk along the edge with a landing net pole at the start of every session, scraping the bottom to pick up the well hidden lines. They were being set between Hampton and Chertsey weekly at one point around the turn of the century. This fish has clearly had too nigh on rip its own face off to get free at some point in the past. You can see the scar damage further down its side, I would guess from shaking the rock while trying to free itself. We all know that it happened. The river Thames suffered more than anywhere unfortunately. This was the only carp I ever banked like this. He was clearly a survivor, one that had actually managed to free himself. I dread to think how many of the Thames's special old ones ended up on someone's dinner plate.

There was a thread on here recently pointing out some soppy old idiot giving out advice on some utterly crap video to use double Salmon hooks for carp fishing. That's exactly what the people who take them for the table use. Because once the hooks become buried in soft tissue, it's virtually impossible for the fish to free itself.

The Polish anglers who now fish the Thames after the big cats, are among the best anglers you would ever meet on these shores. The people who were raping the rivers for food in the early 2000's were not anglers. They were people who had just arrived from Eastern Europe and had to feed themselves. My problem was with them taking the special old Thames carp.

In reply to Post #78
Wow fair play lol I don't think anyone on my syndicate are using them so I'll grab a few different s2's
Cheers for the reply 👍

Scan of print. Around 1997/98. River Thames, Hampton sailing club, Hurst park. My personal favourite ever carp, a common too. My first Thames 30lb+. One of a number of carp I caught around the same time, which I never saw photos of anyone else holding. It had the membranes still intact inside its mouth, they were thicker and more rubbery than its outer lips. The house behind my shoulder is on an island. That's the ferry/boat yard owners house who i mentioned previously.

Walthamstow, February 2012. One of the coldest days I've ever fished. It was so stupidly bitter that I could barely hold this fish up for the pics. This was the biggest one of a large multiple catch on a half day session. All of the fish were taken from an area no more than one foot deep. One foot of water, above six or seven foot of thick silt. The carp were moving through the silt itself. This particular fish was presumed long dead by the management. It had not been caught for many years. It was also far bigger than it had previously ever been. It was the most stupid days fishing ever. I literally could not keep the rods in the water that afternoon, I also could not feel my hands for hours it was that bitterly cold. The carp absolutely loved it though. Two over 35, another over 30 among plenty of others. I only arrived at 1pm and left at 7pm. I could never beat that day in terms of winter carping. Long running naked chod rigs with S2 corks, fished over loads of pre soaked T&M freezer baits. I ran out of bait that evening. Two days previously I had seen what looked like tiny roach dimpling on the surface under a strong torch beam in darkness. It was big carp feeding in the thickest silt, the silt which the anglers all steered well clear of. Living their best lives feeding on bloodworm. That's clearly why this fish had gone missing for so long.

In reply to Post #74
That's sad news. I remeber Tim from the old Cemex forum days.

Hi Mark. Do you use the 12s or the 16s for your chod fishing? Not a question about the buoyancy, more do you prefer a smaller or larger bait on a chod?

In reply to Post #85
I have very rarely ever used our 13mm crushed cork pop ups. Always a 16mm for me on a chod or SHR.

Common thinking in carp fishing with normal pop ups/hook baits would dictate that you go as small as is possible. I will only use smaller hook baits when fishing over seeds in the summer, on the deck. For everything else regarding our stuff fishing wise, it is always the 16mm. That's often a hard one for carp anglers to get their head around. As like so many things in carp fishing, we are all preprogrammed a certain way by carp fishing media. Our hook baits work in a completely different way to everyone else's because of the process which they go through. So the complete opposite is true. The bigger the bait, the more of the goodness is contained within the centre of the bait itself.

Real food, completely untouched by any preservation, slowly fermenting inside a protected atmosphere inside the very centre of the bait itself. That's why they get better with age.

Common practice among bait makers is to lead you down a path of much bigger baits. As there is far less work involved in producing 25kg of 20mm, than there is making 25kg of 12mm.

Again, the complete opposite is true with us, as rolling is only the very beginning of the work with our hook baits. If we could make a 20mm hook bait in the same time scale as a 16mm bait, we 100% would. Put simply, there is far to much work involved for us drying that size of hook bait over and over again. It trebles the production times going from a 16mm to a 20mm for us. Trebles the energy costs. We would need to charge a fortune for them.

Bigger is ALWAYS better with our stuff.

In reply to Post #86
Thanks Mark. Any more info on the Hutchy special editions?

In reply to Post #86
When Mark talks we listen 👍😊

In reply to Post #88
Listening to me droning on, spamming the bait section

In reply to Post #87
I keep being asked this same particular question. What information do you need? They are absolutely mustard, that's according to all of our customers who are buying them. Now our best selling hook bait.

Plenty of you on this forum seem to live up north. You have seen Carl and his son Jude from Stoke plenty this year. Last week Carl smashed his personal best on a short session. His best trip of an entire lifetimes carp fishing. Banked four before everything turned to ice at 6pm.

Banoffee S2 balanced over Rollinbaits Inception. Well done again Carl if you are reading. I think you are.









Scopex/Pineapple S2



Scopex/Pineapple S2



Scopex/Pineapple S2