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Match Fishing’s Joe Carass looks at the Japanese bait revolution Marukyu!


Do you believe bait makes a difference to your catches? The reason I ask is that I have been fishing with many Marukyu backed anglers recently and I have also been experimenting with a bit myself.

I must admit to been a bit sceptical at first when I heard about Marukyu bait, but I am not naïve enough to believe that it doesn’t work so over the past 12 months I have been giving the bait a good go and I know it has been said a million times but it is all about the science!     

A recent trip to the Glebe confirmed this to me; I was fishing the long pole on a rock hard day. I initially fed the swim with EFG 161, 2mm pellets and fished a standard 4mm Bag Em expander on the hook. It was just rock hard and I could not get a bite. At this point none other than Roy Marlow came and sat with me and soon explained that my mix was wrong for the water temperature that I was faced with. He went to his car and got me a bag of EFG 130 and a jar of JPZ and told me to feed a small ball of groundbait.

I potted the bait in and waited, the float sat there for ages and I was starting to doubt the bait when suddenly the float slid away and I latched into a quality skimmer. More came to the net and I was left amazed. More to the point Alex Bones was on the next peg and had located a shoal of carp with his bomb and boilie approach, I quickly grabbed my feeder rod, filled my feeder with EFG 130 and baited my hook with two JPZ and cast to the same spot. Bites were instant and it definitely out fished the boilie and bomb approach.

I was left amazed that just changing the mix to one designed for fishing in these cold temperatures had made all of the difference. I have since used the EFG 130 a lot and have noticed that skimmers in particular cannot get enough of the stuff!
It seems to me that you have to take notice of the packaging and the actual temperatures that the mix needs to be used in. for example I have used the EFG 151 a lot in the summer and caught well but I have tried it in colder weather with little success.

I have also had lots of success with the Krill powder that everybody raves about and simply add it to my micro pellets when fishing the Method.

The more I use this bait, and I know lots of other anglers are using it too, the more I feel that this bait could give me the edge. I need to suss out when it is best to use the rest of the range but I feel that I am getting there.

I will report back with more of my findings but so far the EFG 130 and 131 get a massive thumbs up from me!

Joe Carass