Deads

[Homer Simpson]

Maggots that is!

The club pond gets quite weedy with oxygenating bottom weeds so I have decided to give deads a try.

I have put half a pint in the freezer.
Assume that I thaw them out the day before, but can I refeeze them?

Do you use these and what do you do?

[Santiago]

I wouldn't refreeze them or ant other bait as you risk serious food poisoning from contact with the bait with fingers, with poison getting onto your sandwiches etc. Some anglers have been hospitalised through refreezing baits. So best not risk it. Best freeze in small batches etc. etc.

[John Milford]

I've frozen surplus maggots and found them to be a perfectly good bait. Dead maggots are an effective hook bait and certainly good enough to mix into groundbait. I can't comment on re-freezing them though, as I've never had enough left after their 'second outing' to warrant doing that.

Slightly off topic, I once had a tub of 'Lazarus maggots'.

I'd bought two pints a couple of days before I intended to fish and put them in a cool corner of the garage. When I inspected the tub on the day I went fishing, I realised that I'd put them in an airtight pellet box, rather than one with a perforated lid!

Every one of them was limp, stretched and utterly still. Needing the pellet box for pellets, I put the maggots in their correct tub and set off for the lake.

Upon opening the lid on arrival, to my amazement they'd all apparently risen from the dead and were wriggling away furiously, none the worse from 48 hours of suffocation!

[Old Man River]

Keeping maggots starved of oxygen and in a comatose cold state is a well known way of keeping them alive !

After a trip out, If I have any left, which are always bulked up by offerings from a friend who I fish with, I tip the lot into a plastic bag ( I use one of the recycling green bags provided by the refuse collectors)

Tip the maggots into the bag and expell as much air as you can, before tying a knot in the bag. The maggots are now in an airtight “cell” if you like.
I now put the bag into a standard plastic food container, just big enough to contain the bag of Maggots.
Put the container into the fridge in the coldest spot you can find without freezing them ,In ours its the bottom shelf at the back.
I can usually leave the mggots there for about 6 days at most before taking them out and giving them a breath of air. Tip them into a standard bait box and leave the lid off. They start out looking as dead as dodos, but after a half hour they will be as lively as fresh ones.Give them a sprinkling of maize, or sawdust to scour them off a bit and go fishing . The few dead ones you may find , well Ijust flick them in as a bit of loose feed, or give them to a friendly robin.

David

I have only had two failiures in many years doing the above. I put it down to getting maggots beyond their best from the tackle shop.

[RBTraditional]

An old mate of mine (dead now, but not food poisoning) swore by dead maggots in silty or weedy water and did very well with the tench…..

[Liphook]

Back in the day I used to get asphyxiated maggots delivered by the gallon to my house in Dumfriesshire, prior to that we took it in turns to drive the considerable distance to Carlisle to buy the little blighters. They played a pivotal role in coarse fishing campaigns on lochs like Barean, Woodhall, Carlingwark and Ken.

[Olly]

It is/was the best way to take them to France - - not too sure if that is legal now!

[Dave Burr]

Dead maggots are just as effective as live ones and, as you Homer suspect, are good for lying on top of the weed/gravel bottom where live ones would disappear within seconds.

[Breadhead]

I use dead maggots in the colder months: buy some of those clippy plastic boxes, half fill with filtered tap water, flavour water if required, put live maggots into the plastic boxes, clip on the lids and place in freezer. Don't forget to allow time to thaw when going fishing. Good luck.

[Ian]

The belief that maggots dig into silt is an old wives tale. I’ve put them in both my fish tanks, one with coarse gravel and the other with fine sand and all they do is wriggle and don’t move in any direction really, not unless a fish picks one up and drops it at another part of the tank. The only way maggots will go under the silt is with the feeder taking them there. Live maggots will never dig into the silt enough to affect using them . Weed a few inches above bottom is a different matter, though even then the fish can dig them out easily.
The reason for using them dead is to fool the fish into believing they have been in the water for a long time and therefore must be safe to eat, just like the skin of corn on a hook can work better than a whole kernel sometimes, especially on popular venues.