How to make a spod mix for carp fishing [Easy Guide]

In this article, I am going to guide you on how to make a cost-effective go anywhere spod mix for carp fishing. This spod mix is made up of four well-renowned carp-catching baits. Any one of these baits on its day will do great, but I find a nice mix that combines the lot, keeps the fish grabbing around in the swim longer, and also gives you the chance to fish different hook baits over the top of it giving you options for your session, so let’s get started.

Make the best spod mix for carp fishing

Boilies bait for carp

In my bucket, I’ve got some crushed-up boilies. You can use just whole boilies in a spod mix but I find crushing them up definitely helps release their smells and attractants into the water and also helps the bait mix flutter down and settle over silts or weeds.

The way I’ve crushed these boilies is just taking the standard freezer bait that I’ve got in a bag. I popped it into a crusher which has got you to know sharp points all inside it and as you crush that up it makes a nice mix of sizes.

I’ve got some almost whole boilies in there that are just broken slightly and then I’ve got pretty much just dust as well. Those tiny dust pieces will help cloud the water up simulating you know when fish have stirred up the bottom.

That boilie mix is what I start with.

Pellets for carp fishing

Add to that I’ll take some pellet. These are just small pellets, I think they’re like 4ml. Anything which is between about 4-6 ml is great, smaller than that you can use uh but you’ll often just find a lot of small fish will eat that up.

You can use larger pellets as well but I quite like these response pellets they’re only small but they help darken off the mix as well.

I tend to like a relatively dark mix with a few little brighter offerings inside like with the sweet corn. But I put a few handfuls of this pellet into the mix.

One thing I’ll say about the pellets is if you’re fishing somewhere with loads of bream in it hold off on the pellet. You might want to put a little bit or maybe even not any pellet at all. Only because bream just seemed to really really like pellets.

If you haven’t got bream in the lake you’re fishing go heavy on the pellet because carp absolutely love it. To be honest all species love the pellet and they’ll sort of slowly degrade in the water and break apart.

They’re also quite oily, particularly like trout halibut pellets, they release a lot of oils into the water which will sort of come up in the water column.

The other two baits I’ve got are more natural you could say.

Use corn bait to make the best spod mix for carp

One is sweet corn, this is probably the bait that’s caught more carp than any other in history.

Sweet corn is the bait I used when I first started fishing and still do to this day. I tend not to put a lot of corn in a spod mix, maybe just a couple of handfuls.

The reason why the corn goes in is first of all because carp love it. It doesn’t fill them up very much, it doesn’t really give them a huge amount of nutrition, it just bulks out the mix and makes it really cheap.

The frozen corn, the great grains tend to be smaller, I wouldn’t use frozen bags of corn if I was wanting to use a hook bait, if I wanted to put corn on a hair rig or on the hook I’d get the tins.

The tins of corn tend to have larger grains which are much better and stay on the hook better.

But the other reason why there’s corn in the mix is just for that little bit of color. When the carp come in and they spot those little bits of corn I find it can give you the chance of fishing, fake corn on the hook or a little yellow pop-up on the hook you can get quite quick bites I’m not sure why but out of a big bed of bait sometimes those carp will just come in and nail the thing that’s brightest and in their face.

So having a bit of corn in there means you can switch over to using a nice hi-vis yellow pop-up or a bit of fake sweet corn on your hair rig and that can do you some really quick bites.

Hemp bait for carp

The last thing or rather second to last thing because there’s a secret ingredient coming next is hemp. Hemp will help keep fish feeding in your swim for prolonged periods of time.

It’s small, it’s dark and it makes a bit of a crunch when the fish are feeding on it. I’ll tip a load of that in but I’ll also be sure to include plenty of that hemp liquid because that’s full of natural oils and attractants.

Now that is looking pretty much perfect. One thing I’ll mention about the hemp is that you mustn’t just go and buy dry, unprepared hemp and stick that straight into your spod mix because that can actually swell up inside the fish once they’ve eaten it and that can prove very damaging for them and even kill them in some cases.

So make sure that if you’re using particles like hemp you prepare it before your session or you just buy a small bottle or tin of pre-prepared hemp from the tackle shop.

This stuff is just boiled in the can so that you don’t have to faff around with any boiling or soaking before your session. So that mix is pretty much done.

One thing you can do is it’s kind of optional but that is to add some sort of bonus liquid attractants, a little glug of that can give your bait just that bit of extra attraction and help your mix stand out over the person who’s fishing in the next swim down.

So you’ve got different options for hook baits. You can fish a boilie over this, you can fish a bit of corn a tiger nut. The smaller particles will help keep the fish in your swim for longer.

The large pieces of boilie will actually give them some sustenance that makes them feel like coming back to your spod and feeding on it again and yeah that’s pretty much it.

It’s quite simple only the four ingredients really and yeah not too expensive. If you’re on a tight budget you can bulk it out with plenty of sweet corn and pellet which tends to be cheaper than you know boilie or prepared particles, but this mix is something that we’ve used countless times and caught loads and loads of carp on it.

How to bait accurately with a spod or spomb

So now that you’ve made up your spod mix how do you get that bait out into the lake accurately around your rigs? Well, we like to use something called a spomb halfway between a spod and a bomb.

This device enables you to load it up with bait, close it, and on impact, with the surface, the button gets pressed and your bait all falls out.

But it’s not as simple as that because you want to make sure that you cast the same distance each time and also in the same direction.

The way to do this is to let around to find your spot or choose the area where you want to do fishing. Once you’re happy with the spot put the line in the line clip.

Then reel that in and place your distance sticks in the ground. Wrap your line around those distance sticks and count the number of times it takes to wrap around them.

Then you can take your spod rod with the braid on, wrap it around the same number of times, and put the line into the clip. Now providing you stand in the same spot and you aim at the same tree or pylon or whatever on the far bank.

You make that cast, bring the rod back behind you until it hits the clip and that spawn will be landing exactly where your fishing rods were landing too.

Now in deep water you’ll you will want to clip up your spomb rod slightly shorter just to account for the fact that when your rig falls in it falls sort of back towards you a little bit on a pendulum. That’s it really.

Baiting up with the spomb is as accurate as your casting is and it will take a little bit of practice to make sure that you’re casting nice and accurately.

But as long as you keep standing in the same place, you use the same marker each time, and remember how many wraps around the distant sticks it took you’ll be able to bait up accurately each time.

How much bait to use to make a perfect spod mix

Now when you first arrive the amount of bait you put in, kind of depends on where you’re fishing, and how many fish are in the lake.

But as a general rule of thumb if the lake has got lots of fish and they’re feeding hard then you can introduce more and if you haven’t really seen very much it’s probably best not to put loads and loads of bait out.

Remember you can always put more bait in but you can’t take it out so what we like to do on a session is just put a few out to start and then if we catch one if we get a few bream, maybe get a bite and lose one top up with a little bit more baits. Try and keep the fish feeding, keep giving them something to munch on in the swim.

But it’s definitely not worth doing loads and loads of bait at the beginning before you really know how those fish are going to respond.

Anyway, hopefully, this article helped you make up not only a cheap and effective spod mix but also helped you get it in the right place each time as well. Good luck with your fishing and we’ll see you in the next fishing article, bye.