I was thinking about using some dry dog food as a pop up. Anyone have any other interesting non-traditional pop up ideas.

I know I get ridiculous trying to save a few $$$ here and there.

Dog food is bouyant usually, but I doubt it is bouyant encounter to pop-up a boilie. I�t will also lead to a lot more catfish. I�d use something artificial like foam, or wine bottle cork shaved down into little spheres.

I absolutely trust you. My mind just doesn't register inedible things as valid options. So I could literally just use a small cork?

Yep. There are lots of inedible things that people use, from the plastic pop ups you saw when we fished to weird things like ear plugs soaked in flavor.

Absolutely

I've tried "them all" over the years, but I come back to 2 thing fairly often:

1) Fake corn, fake pellets, etc. Cheap and last for...ever.
2) A styrofoam ball that I can wrap paste, dough, etc, around it.

The key thing is what else is around your hook bait. If you just throw out a "brown cork" by itself you're probably not going to catch anything. But throw that brown cork around a pile of seeds, pellets, pet food, etc, etc, your chances just went up substantially. lol..

Nice! When I use cork/foam balls I like to cut a few small chunks off to give it more irregularity. I think the irregular shaped items look more natural.

Thanks for the feedback on this! I'll have to adjust my thinking. From some of the secondary reading I have done, it looks like using an artificial pop-up will also help in weeding out turtles and catfish.

I'd love for that to be the case, but you still get the occasional turtle/cat. I went for the longest without catching a turtle then got this Common Snapper the other day that was so heavy I couldn't land him without injury to either myself, my equipment, or the turtle.



I'd have loved to get a weight on him, he was likely over 30! Pop ups and plastic baits don't prevent turtles and catfish, what they do prevent, however, are turtles stealing your bait. It's very difficult for a turtle to slowly scrape away at a boilie but not impossible. With a plastic bait, they can chew it all they want and unless they somehow undo the boilie stop they're not getting it off.

This stuff works quite well, especially chili lime flavor in colder water:


Here are some nice catches using them as hookbait on a hair, pegged with 1 fake corn to wold them in place.

Horrible autoshoot on old camera, but nice 27 lbs fall carp caught in 50 degrees water:



Same spot 1 year later, same rig, this time 27.5 lbs:



The following year, same rig but on the the St Lawrence river, yet another 27 lbs carp. Seems to be magic weight on this setup.



And finally a smaller one in the mid teens on yet another river, this time during ice out in April. Mine was landed on the same rig, first of a double header with a friend of mine first time fishing that spot. We're actually on a large sheet of ice in the pic:

My pop up experiment after about 2.5 hours with dog food. That's an Orange-Sharkleberry boilie BTW. Delicious!

Nice fish there Freshwater Phil. Carp are the gourmets of the lakes. Such accepting pallettes.

They sell sheets of foam in neon colors at Hobby Lobby. you can get a near lifetime supply for less than ten bucks. I rig my hookbaits on either side of the foam on the hair rig and then add a split shot weight to keep it from floating to the top cause that stuff is incredibly buoyant.

Here's my latest homemade pop-up creation.

The brighter white object is a Frank Warwick immortal artificial boilie.

when i want to pop up fake corn i use foam , this foam i found after a flood at the edge after water receded i cut it into squares with a utility knife blade i have bought real pop ups in the past but never had luck with them but do with this