Back in the early 2000's I owned a tackle shop in the small cornish town of Wadebridge, called the Bait Bunker. To give it an edge over surrounding shops I starting making my own rolled boilies available from the shop - Orangutang, WonderBerry and the Reservoir Specials were all stand out recipes that dominated most of the local venues.
The RS's began when Andy Seery gave me 2 sacks of halibut brood powder - a commercial blended fishmeal product that was produced for marine fish farming and manufactured and dried at a very low temperature and from very high quality fish and shellfish. I always used a fair bit of Robin Red in my baits but chatting with Rod Hutchinson one day he told me it is far more effective blended 50/50 with Spanish Pepper RRR so this mixture was put into the Brood powder, along with another Haiths birdfood PTX....the rest of the recipe was soya, some milks, a fish hydrolysate, some binder etc and a few spicy bits and pieces.....I made a liquid package combining Minamino, the hydrolysate and 3 Rod hutchinson Flavours, one of which was very distinctive and impossible to hide! This liquid combined with the Brood basemix caught instantly and everywhere it was used....the main local carp waters were all reservoirs so the RESERVOIR SPECIALS were born.
****fill in 20 + years of bait rolling and carp catching*****
Making a huge leap forward to Covid and lockdowns the shops were all closed and anglers needed bait - every year I'd get countless requests to make batches of the original Bait Bunker boilie from old friends and new customers alike - but we were busy on new baits, new concepts so i never got round to it until 2020 when it seemed quite viable to revisit my old recipe....Unfortunately the Halibut Brood powder had been discontinued by the makers many many years before - it was a victim of its own success as the temperature they used to dry it was too low to kill most bacteria and it was failing too many salmonella tests making it unviable..there are other nice fishmeals available these days so we decided on a meal with a high salmon & trout content - its more sustainable and a bit different from all the common sea fish based meals....Next step - the Robin Red had to be changed by the makers as the oil soluble red dye used was basically outlawed for use in feed so they'd gone down the Beetroot powder route but this was fine by me as its an excellent ingredient in its own right. The Spanish Pepper RRR seems much the same and is still combined 50/50 and i thought it best to stick with the current Haiths PTX to remain as true as possible to the original Specials.
Back at the start I used to use eggs and leave the shell in - partly to save filling my bins up with stinking egg shell, partly as the weight of the shell ended up as part of the bait so returns were good, and hopefully to add a little calcium to the fish & waters...the shell was already well smashed so i dont think there was any 'crunch' made by the fish as they ate it. These days we dont use wet eggs so no shell would be in the new bait. The liquids were no problem - everything was available and we are even the sole producer of one of them inhouse so have total control over the purity, freshness and strength of the liquid package.
As most people reading this know I chose the name Resource for the 2020 bait but I've been asked to change it, so on reflection I agree - the best and only name my recipe should have is the original one - the RESERVOIR SPECIALS - so this is the name you'll find in the web shop, the promotions and the social media posts.
