As a result, they need less food, but although it is trickier to land fish at this time of the year, it is not impossible. It does require that you take a different approach to feeding and you need to choose the best bait.

In the following post we will look at 6 of the best fishing baits for landing carp during winter.

Maggots

Let's start with one of the ultimate cold-water carp baits - maggots. By far the most reliable way to ensure you still land carp when the temperature drops is to have a PVA mesh bag of maggots and some grubs on a hair-rig or maggot clip. Carp absolutely love maggots, because they are incredibly easy to digest. The best approach is to cast often and tightly to create an area and make sure you use some grubs on your rig to balance the hook's weight better.

Salt

Adding salt to your baits is a great way to attract fish throughout the year. It is especially effective though, when the conditions are much cooler and you are trying to build up a small and tight area of attraction. Rather than using salt full of chemicals, use a good quality rock or sea salt. This can easily be mixed into ground baits and pastes and can even be sprinkled over corn, hemp, pellets, casters and maggots.

Spices

Winter fishing and spices mix well together. Thanks to there being many Asian stores up and down the country, you have the option of a wide variety of spices to try. Try Garam masala on ground bait, turmeric with maggots and even chilli-flavoured hemp to get those all-too elusive carp.

Corn

Highly visible and incredibly easy for carp to digest, corn is one of the best baits. We'd say it's even better than maggots, because it is resistant against small silvers that can easily steal maggots.

Peperami

Odd choice for many, but you simply can't knock its effectiveness. Even though it is a tad on the oily side, this is attractive to barbell, chub and crucially, carp. It's easy to work with as it can be cut down to small chunks.

Liquids

Those solid PVA bags you might be using can be filled with liquids. Liquids are a great way to produce a high level of attraction without using any of your precious feed. You need to trial and error with liquids to get a mix that works, but chocolate malt and condensed milk is a great one to start with for carp.

There you have it, 6 great baits to try when you are out there fishing in the winter and trying to land those carp. There are many others you can use, but the 6 above are along our favourites.

If you want some more carp fishing tips check out https://www.carpnbait.co.uk