LATEST ADDITIONS

Solar team ember Colin Gray seemingly can't put a foot wrong on his current target water Darenth Big Lake. Squeezing overnight sessions in between a hectic work schedule, Colin has caught on each of his past three consecutive sessions, with the biggest carp being a 35lb 8oz common landed on a Solar Pineapple and N-Butyric Acid pop-up presented over a bed of Club Mix boilies. The second fish, a 20lb-plus common and his third, a lovely mirror of 31lb 8oz, also fell to the same tactics. Colin hopes his form will continue through his upcoming BCAC semi finals and the Eric's Angling Carp Championship semi-finals, both of which he will be competing in over the coming weeks.

TC reader Sam Rafferty from London says: "I wasn’t sure I liked these when they first arrived, although I was grateful for being sent something to review that was made by such a top company as Fox. "The Slik clip is very different from those I’ve been used to, so I wasn’t convinced they’d be for me. However, once I started using them I found them extremely easy to get on with and have had nothing but good to say about them since. "The colour (more akin to a Korda green) wouldn’t be my first choice because I have all-blue LEDs on my alarms, but that’s not such a big deal, or is it? I note from Fox’s website that you can get blue versions, so I might have to sell this set to my mate and buy some of those instead!"There’s plenty of room in the head for an isotope, although I find those far too expensive so don’t bother with one, and I really like the short ball-chain style.

The days of shelf-life baits being bullet-hard balls of nothing more than artificial flavours and very little goodness are well and truly behind us. In recent years, several companies have upped their game with their shelf-life baits but all have done so alongside their existing frozen ranges. Sonubaits has gone one step further in launching only a shelf-life boilie. With Code Red being its first foray into the carp-boilie market some would say this is a gamble.

Six new varieties have been added to the already comprehensive line-up of Goo ‘flavours’, namely Coconut Cream Bait Smoke, Squid Supreme Bait Smoke, Caramel Supreme Bait Smoke, Spicy Squid Power Smoke, Garlic Glaze Power Smoke and Garlic Supreme Bait Smoke. Some of these smell absolutely sublime, to our noses at least. I’m not at all convinced that baits ‘smell’ to carp anything like they do to us, so something like the Caramel Supreme (which I cannot stop sniffing) will undoubtedly catch as many anglers as carp, but to be fair there are plenty of baits out there that I could say the very same thing about. In fact, this could apply to the majority of non-fishmeal-based baits.