Broad Beans

[Dave Burr]

I recall reading something about broad beans as bait in a book or magazine dated fro 1963 or 64. Nothing new eh? I've had fish on Kidney Beans but mainly bream.

[Shaun Harrison]

The most successful beans I have used by a long way have been good old black eyed beans and little mentioned Pinto Beans.

[Woodytia]

I'm sure kidney beans soaked in Cambell's tomato soup were and may still be a successful bait for Tench and Carp. John wilson has written a whole book about all sorts of baits including different beans. Surely the measure of a good bait is one that consistently catches fish on different waters throughout the season. I'd be willing to give anything a go but as my fishing time is limited I don't really have a chance to experiment so I stick to tried and trusted baits, like bread, meat, maggots and worms. I've never had much luck with sweetcorn even though I know it is a good bait for a variety of fish, I usually get some to mix in with hemp for prebaiting but on the hook I've no confidence in it.

[BeechmereLake]

I seem to remember back in the late 70's Rod Hutchinson mentioning tomato soup and black eyed beans then in the early 1980's when I was doing the rounds as bailiff for ARC some of the big gravel pits saw this bait by the bucket load, Horseshoe lake being one of them, there was also the good old Strawberry flavored chick peas before the peanut tragedy.

If I go back to somewhere around 1978-79 I think it was Duncan Kay who used sweetcorn to great effect on some of the Northants waters and had the nickname "blackmagic" for it, soon after Mr Yates had the bishop from Redmire on the same bait, at the time we were still using Bread and maggot but a change over to the "yellow peril" gave us huge increases in fish captures, a great bait then and still today, for the first 6 weeks of the season the Bream on the river Thames wont really touch anything else

[Dave Burr]

You can also get Chilli kidney beans which makes then an excellent bait for carp, barbel etc.

[BeechmereLake]

Have to be honest when I did Carp fish I tried to keep my peg more natural than like a deli counter

[St.John]

Broad beans as hook baits over hemp. Waste of time, doesn't work, carp hate it!

[Gammarus]

I remember using broad beans in he early 70s on Chichester gravel pits. No idea why we tried them but they worked well, I vaguely recall putting 3 beans on a hook and freelineing them in soft weed beds. I was always impressed that carp seemed to find them in thick weed and I caught.

[Aitch]

think they were either pinto or black eyed beans

[Shaun Harrison]

Glancing through my journals looking for something else I stumbled across this broad bean capture I made in 1982.



The following page goes on to mention more Broad Bean action but to be fair the old Black Eyes were far more consistent for us.