Maggot Quantity Per Session Calculator

If you find yourself in the middle of a tournament (or fishing day) when you realize you only have a few hours left and you’re out of bait, you’ll freak out. That often happens when you are on a hot bite on some bank or something similar and time is precious. You didn’t purchase too many maggots. That wasn’t the issue.

The issue is that you confused volume with count. In the world of live bait, they aren’t synonymous at all. Sure, a pint of regular white maggots might be 3,000 maggots strong but a pint of squatts can be upwards of 6,000 or even more. Then you either end up drowning your swim in food or starving it for lack of a better term.

Why You Should Use the Bait Calculator

That’s why the calculator above work. By allowing you to set details for your session, it translates those into real bait needs instead of loose estimate. Knowing what size grade you use helps determine how many baits you has to play with. Anglers frequently overlook this, as standard maggots is quite different than pinkies or squatts. Standard maggots are much larger, giving you a lot fewer baits per pint.

When you’re fishing gently in colder water, this makes all the difference in the world. Because fish digest things slower in winter, they also get picky faster; you want really minimal free offerings to maintain their attention while ensuring they don’t fill themselves. Your next bait doesn’t need to be too small a change either which is why the tool takes these factors into account when making its recommendations. Feeding carp during hot summer days will result in a heavier-handed suggestion compared to a light approach if you’re catching shy roach in clear water.

Perhaps the most overlooked variable when it comes to planning sessions is the feed. Lots of guys look at hookbait as being the only thing that matters and if they can change the bait every cast then they’re good to go. Big mistake! A little feed will keep fish in the swim until you locate them. It’ll also hold their attention between bites. On a waggler set-up or even a pole, for example, you may wish to drop a small handful of maggots every few minutes. These small amounts soon start to mount up over course of a five hour session.

Enter the calculator. Simply enter how many maggots you want to put out each feed and an interval in minutes. This will reveal the real cost of your approach. You might well discover that regular but light feeding uses far more overall bait than intermittent heavy shots, it adds up gradually over time.

Complicating the scenario are water conditions. High amounts of nuisance fish such as skimmers will rob your bait from the intended target fish, as will flowing water. If you can’t fish light, the smaller fish will win. You will need to feed them fast enough to get some bait down below the surface layer. Recognizing that the same thing doesn’t work when fishing a river with current versus a still day, the tool add variables for pressure, flow, and color of water. It also allows for a reserve percentage factor to accommodate unexpected delays, spillage and waste.

As a general guideline: Always bring a little more than you think you might need…but having an exact idea of ‘how much’ more keeps you from either over-packing bulky tubs or underestimating requirements for a lengthy commercial session. So how much do you plan for? That’s ultimately a balance between efficient use of baits vs. Confidence. How many baits will be eaten before they are full up but not so stuffed they won’t even take the hook? Do you need to feed them enough to keep them in the swim?

The calculator links to some reference tables shown below. These provide a quick check for different methods and species, from heavy bream feeder sessions to roach work on canals. These tell you what sort of bait grades makes sense and roughly what appetite factors to expect for any given situation. Combine those general rules with the specifics of the session you’re going on and suddenly the guesswork has gone out of your preparations.

You know exactly what baits you’ve got in the bag, and you know why you have them. When the tub gets down, you’re not panicking because you should of knew you had the reserve. You simply keep fishing and trust that you prepared for whatever the day might throw at you.