There's a new big player in the hook bait league, and that’s the wafter.
Selling as many units as pots of pop-ups, the wafter is a hybrid hook bait halfway between a pop-up and a bottom bait.
If you wanted a slow-sinking hook bait that would settle on weed or lightly over a soft, silty lakebed, in the past you generally had to work backwards from a pop-up, by adding weight. The same applied if you wanted a rig that negated the weight of the hook. Or you could add buoyancy to a standard boilie, but whichever way you did it, it was a bit fiddly.
Wafters are designed to be balanced when the weight of the hook is factored in. They are buoyant, but nowhere near as buoyant as a traditional pop-up.
They have carefully calculated buoyancy, so that when they are mounted on an appropriately sized hook, they sink slowly.
They give you the advantage of a hook bait being taken into a carp’s mouth more easily than a free offering, allowing hooks on modern rigs to twist and find a hold instantly.
It’s a headache for bait manufacturers to achieve, of course, because everybody has different ideas what a suitable hook is for a given bait size.
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