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Reading this thread has been quite a refreshing experience. I spent a dark period when I paid far to much attention to the carp forums, where so many people were in grave danger of disappearing up their own "armholes". All you heard about was secret additives, spouted by pseudo scientists who were all trying to bluff each other that you needed to have a bait that was the fishy equivalent of crack cocaine to even stand a chance. There must have been a whole generation of young carp anglers who thought that the main priorities were to have the required amount of stainless steel accessories and whatever was the latest bait additive - probably of borderline toxicity. Any angling skills were marginal requirements.

If there is one thing that I have missed by not making my own boilies, is the boilie paste mix that I always used to use to cover my hook baits with. This always used to be made from an Activ-8 base mix with a few extra additives, or else its stable mate with a similar name - the name of which escapes me.

Another trick I used to use was to make up a few hook baits from the Nash Airball mix, so that I could present two boilies, snowman style - again covered in pastes. I could imagine this concoction hovering just off the bottom, gradually releasing slowly dissolving paste into the current, then very slowly descending onto the river bed. Did it actually do that? Well who knows, but it gave me added confidence. Otherwise, I never used whole boilies, always three half baits, mounted open end downwards. I always made my own to be as soft as possible, probably just to do the opposite of what was trendy at the time, which was to use rock hard, air-dried baits - something I always thought that apart from being stupid was possibly harmful to the fish.

I stopped doing all that when I realised that the vast majority of barbel were being caught on either casters or pellets. Mind you, I don't catch anywhere near as many river carp as I used to.