Wicked Wafters

The thinking carp angler offers his opinion, insight and advice every week exclusively here in Angler’s Mail. Col will help you become a wiser angler.

- Colin Davidson

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.