My association with Pallatrax and Simon Pomeroy came about completely by chance.  At the time I was head bailiff of the Carp Society’s Horseshoe Lake and Chairman of the Waters Committee for the Carp Society.  Simon had attended a regional meeting for the Swindon area bringing with him a range of Pallatrax products; it was during this meeting that Simon invited Ian Poole and myself to Pallington Lakes to sample and review for the carp angling press the fishing on offer and to see the full Pallatrax range of bait and terminal tackle.
We duly arranged a date to meet at Pallington and the rest, as they say, is history.

After some thirty years of Carp fishing and always making and using my own bait, I feel I’m quite well versed in bait making and the endless ingredients that go into making good quality baits and it was with this in mind that I was interested in taking a close look at the Pallatrax range of baits.

At the time Pallatrax had three freezer baits on offer; Poms, Crave and Jungle.

I had some questions to ask Simon.
What made you take the decision to get into the bait market?
“I never really wanted to get into the bait making side of the Carp market, but we have our own waters here at Pallington and to bring on our own Carp we had to feed them with a good quality food source and the only way we could do it with a complete and guaranteed food source was to make it ourselves”

Why only three baits?
 “It’s so we can concentrate on quality of bait, not quantity”
What ingredients are you using as your base mixes?
 I was invited to the bait making room to see for myself.  You couldn’t ask for a more honest answer, not too many bait companies will be so open.

How do you go about field testing your baits?
The answer given by Simon was that it was done in the proper and only way.  The bait was supplied and reports of captures, the testers’ views and what improvements or changes they thought could be made were all passed back to Pallatrax for review.

Do you test your baits during the development stage before field testing?
Again the answer was positive. On the Pallington complex they have a number of clear water ponds containing Carp.  When a new bait is put together, it is applied to the ponds and the reaction of the Carp is studied and the results noted.

And finally, one of the most important questions as far as I was concerned: why at the present time do you only supply freezer baits?
“Again it’s a question of quality; we believe that a freezer bait will always be of a better quality than a shelf life bait because of the ingredients used.  Once preservatives are added, we believe it will downgrade the overall food profile of the bait”
The perfect answer as far as I was concerned.

As I’ve already stated, after some thirty years of Carp fishing and always making and using my own bait, I’d finally come across a commercially available bait that was worthy of more than a second look, despite one or two previous offers from other bait companies that I’d turned down, simply because they couldn’t anywhere near match the quality of bait I was making myself.
Since that initial meeting with Simon in 2004 I can say with some pleasure that I was so impressed with the Pallatrax bait range I’ve never rolled anymore bait of my own, something I thought would never happen, and the results of using the bait have gone from strength to strength with a number of U.K. forties and many, many U.K. thirties all falling to the Pallatrax bait range.