Robin Red is probably the best known successful carp attractor throughout the world and to many anglers, what it is and how it works is a mystery because its full recipe is top secret, but you can get very useful clues on what it is, how it works and how to use it here; so read on…

Robin Red is part of the range of bird foods from a company called Haiths of Cleethorpes England. At present their top ten selling products include the following: Robin Red, Red Factor, Nectarblend, Red Band, Prosecto Insectivorous, Soft Bill, Multi Mix, and Carpticle Mix, Super Red and hempseed. This company have many decades of experience formulating specialised foods for birds for all stages of development and for enhancing plumage, growth, health and so on and these products ideally fit the bill as it were for carp!

Robin Red is a legendary additive and has been known to transform poor catch results instantly. Many of the bird food items mentioned previously have been incorporated into bird food based baits and have been ideal having such digestible and open textures to deliver the stimulation and attraction of Robin Red in baits extremely efficiently. Robin Red is available from endless bait companies but my advice is before you go buying loads, get a small sample from hinders first and them you will be better placed to judge if a bait company product is at least near to the real thing, is the real thing or an outright fake; but only your actual fishing results on each of these will truly tell you what is best to use of course!

The popularity of Robin Red is so great that Im sure that at times in the case of making your own homemade boilies, that if you do not use Robin Red in your bait, it will likely as not be the only carp bait in the water that does not include it! Not using Robin Red can actually be a good thing as carp are so familiar with it on busy very hard-fished carp waters that it could well act as an indicator of potential danger! You might find out a bit more about it and choose to use a component of it instead, or use it in very low levels, this works well winter summer or fall…

Ways to incorporate Robin Red and apply it in homemade baits, spod, method, particles, pellets and boilies mixes are legion. Just dampen your boilies using a mixture of liquid foods and Robin Red… Or try pre-soaking your pellets in any liquids you like and add Robin Red to produce super ground baits, method mixes or spod mixes for example for both winter and summer use.

The formula of Robin Red is secret but what it does to fish is not! Certainly Robin Red is confirmed by Hinders as not containing Carophyll red pigment, but what about other bioactive pigments, such as cantaxanthin? How many carp have been observed to turn a reddish colour at fisheries where Robin Red is applied regularly in even moderate levels; this has made many of my winter fish look amazing!

Homemade boilies benefit even form just an ounce per pound of dry base mix of Robin Red, and even the cheapest soya and semolina mixes are boosted significantly by the highly nutritional stimulation of Robin Red. To boost your pellets, wet them with any liquid even water, and add Robin Red; the red clouding of the water around your bait will certainly improve results when fishing for sight-feeding carp too. Haiths have a mix call Super Red incorporating Robin Red, (which can even be applied in PVA products in neat dry form,) and it contains the following great ingredients:

Super Red has aniseed oil, teasel seeds, crushed Carpticle mix, crushed hempseed, Red Factor, robin Red, peanut granules and crushed tiger nuts. This combination is only one of countless others you could try in making your own boilies, pellets and ground baits and to maximise this and more and to save yourself an fortune in bait costs why not now read on…

By Tim Richardson.