From increased sexual sensations to stress release, the techniques of the Ocean Breath will make a major difference in your life. This essential 50-page "How-To" book teaches you how to breathe to relax stress, increase energy, and connect deeply.
Everyone wants to know what the best way to make incredibly effective baits is. There is lots of advice out there but to really focus on making baits that out-fish the best readymade baits is a skill that even bait making beginners can develop with the right advanced knowledge. Here are a few more revealing select expert tips on recipes and (and on beating readymade baits) to get you seriously catching far more fish!
The major mistake most anglers make when thinking about making their own unique homemade baits is this: they start out thinking about ingredients first! You might think this sounds strange. Why is it wrong to think about ingredients first when after all you are going to use ingredients to make your bait? The answer is that you immediately lose the maximum potential for your baits to be most successful! Think about fishing bait like this and you will be massively more successful; the problem provides the solution! Never think about ingredients first! Always think first about fish when making bait and you guarantee maximum most consistent success.
Now think about fish and how they operate internally and externally in context of their aquatic environment. In other words, deliberately exploit all that they use to avoid getting hooked in your unique, favour by exploiting these systems, sensitivities and behaviours. You achieve this by using the very specific leverage of carefully chosen bait substances chosen exactly due to their impacts you desire to have on fish internally and externally, and of course on water, the medium they will be detected within!
Most bait makers seem to over look that bait is best in solution, not in hard balls sitting on the bottom. In fact carp do not even spend the majority of their time on the bottom anyway. They travel off the bottom and exploit foods and temperature changes in an array of changing natural rhythms and changing conditions including those set by influence of sun and moon electromagnetic changes and so on that affect patterns in things like timings of natural hatches of mayflies and caddis flies, timings of most abundant blooming of bloodworms, timings of most abundant concentrations of zooplankton and algae in different water layers during night time and in certain current streams in a lake on certain days etc.
In this case you are pitting your wits against an ever evolving dynamically changing creature that is not static, and always adapting to new opportunities and threats in its environment, just as we humans are each and every day. You need to relate your bait design to the fish first. Sure fish constantly consume hard shelled crustacean and mollusks such as fresh water shrimp, a range of snails, mussels, and even crayfish in many waters today. It might not seem that much of a coincidence as this is totally logical, but when actually fishing you will get far more bites when fishing where fish feed naturally where their natural food is located.
I hope you can see the link here that if you fish on a bloodworm bed being actively harvested by the biggest fish in your lake then you are going to have far more chance of catching those fish compared to not fishing where the fish are most active! But you can miss out on a big part of the more hidden success formula here. Sure you catch fish when are fishing actually on fish, that much is obvious.
But in this case for instance you are on fishing on top of fish that are not only actively regularly feeding in a location, but are being conditioned through exposure to dissolved substances from the bloodworm and also from vibrations from bloodworm wriggling movements as they move and feed themselves.
Exposure to dissolved bloodworm excretions affects receptors in fish that influences their adaptation so that fish are even more sensitive to this form of food than usual. You can say that bloodworm have become far more palatable to carp. Palatability is a very major part of bait design as it not only means fish will feed and consume your baits, but when optimised for palatability then fish will be induced to feed repeatedly and give you maximum chances of hooking fish!
Being able to become sensitized to a food item is a natural adaptation fish have evolved. Obviously this makes detecting bloodworm and other foods much easier and far more energy efficient. Consider that carp can spend lots of time with their heads buried in black thick silk seeking out bloodworm in summer time. Being far more sensitized to the bloodworm secretions etc makes carp far more able to find extremely nutritious food at least energy cost. If a carp did not sensitise more to a particular food item it could well waste more energy than it would actually derive from finding and digesting it and this is certainly not a situation that will promote chances of survival!
The fact that human receptors sensitise to refined sugar because such sugar satisfies the bodys requirement for instance energy is something to bear in mind. It is not that sugar even stands out as so many substances are addictive in so-called foods today. If I suggest sugar is addictive you would maybe not believe me until I say that the food industry uses it as much as possible because it is addictive and alters the sensitivity of your receptors - even passing these changes onto to your grandchildren through your genes!
Fishing on a prime bloodworm bed means you are exploiting a naturally stimulating aquatic situation that is packed with concentrated foods and stimuli that hold fish and make them feed repeatedly. But the vital key here is that you are exploiting naturally heightened fish sensitivities and natural behaviour patterns and modes of feeding that those related food substances induce.
Among many things we can use baits to best do in order to catch fish is to actually replicate the influence of natural foods upon carp senses. It is all about seeing the bigger picture. We can sensitise fish to our own unique baits in certain ways that make them super potent, but this is simply one angle of attack and this is why it is so easy to out-fish any established readymade bait using your own optimised homemade baits. I mention optimised because heated baits of any form are not optimised. I can make homemade baits without any heating that last as long as I design those to last, from 3 hours to over 20 hours immersion.
I want my baits to be in solution not sitting as hard objects on the bottom. If my baits are hard then they soften but retain a flexible practicable matrix which is constantly open and releasing soluble bait materials. This mean that after 20 hours or even 3 hours if designed so, my hook baits will be smaller upon reeling in - and that is totally OK! Of course my free baits can be designed to break down in whatever time span to become sediment and release the maximum levels of soluble substances. Bait is working best actively breaking down. The most under-optimised baits just sit for hours as whole baits leaching a tiny fraction of components outwards.
Boiled or other heat-coagulated baits are very under-optimised baits indeed! They are a limited compromise to practicality and expectations of the masses who mistakenly think intact baits need to be some kind of conventional solid object attached to a hook - that is all! Think out of the box. Think about natural food items and find softness totally dominates even within crushable shells and carapaces!
So many anglers have a warped group conditioned mindset that makes them think that the ideal carp bait is a round ball or a soft or hard pellet sitting on the bottom or wafting in the water. But in fact the best bait is one that is actually actively dissolving and becoming solution. This dissolving produces the highest maximised concentrations of stimuli in the water that maintain fish physiology in excited states for repeated feeding and making them most vulnerable to being hooked on hook baits!
So think about the fact that carp habitually check out areas of their water for food opportunities and when food is in enough abundance to make feeding on it viable in terms of basic energy needs versus energy costs they will feed most enthusiastically. Ground baits and spod mixes are a reasonable line of attack, and of course using particle baits, crushed particles and crushed boilies and crushed pellets and tiny pellets etc are all part of the way towards keeping fish in a place and feeding. However the point is that you want fish constantly excited, but not fed!
Far too many anglers think baits need to be food, (as in to feed them,) but NO! Exploit sensitivities to substances found in their natural foods sure, but the primary purpose of bait is to stimulate feeding to maximum influence over fish behaviours in order to hook fish most efficiently! If you want to feed fish go start a fish farm and grow fish for profit and maximum weight gains! The 2 concepts of stimulating fish to maximum effect in order to hook them, and making fish food that is best digested for maximum biological conversion into fish, are totally different! I want to catch fish best - not feed them!
You have more chance of catching a carp fishing over 100 baits than 20,000. We used very high protein milk protein baits in low volumes during the seventies and eighties for one reason because they were effective like that, but also you simply did not need large volumes to induce great feeding especially when exploiting their soluble characteristics! It was only when fish meal baits became popularised so much and used as big beds of baits that so many anglers jumped onto the more is more mindset!
In fact the little and often approach is most usually the best way as any leading match man will advise, and the regular spodding of very very soluble bait for example is a good way though nothing new. This was a better method of bait delivery than using catapults at any range, and the Gardener bait rocket for example has been around for decades and I really enjoyed its benefits fishing over crushed extremely open granular bird food and pig food based type homemade baits in the eighties.
You want fish to be as excited and as stimulated as possible but not fed, so they will have most reason to try your hook baits multiple times. I say this as fish can be incredibly sensitive to bait density compared to water, among many other characteristics, and of course it is no surprise the most carefully balanced rig and bait can be beaten by very wary carp time and time again. However, when carp are stimulated to the degree that caution is overcome, well you see my point. This is for me the entire point of using fishing baits and designing baits optimised to actually achieve this situation. No whole baits do this satisfactorily and certainly no whole machine-formed readymade boilies can achieve this particularly if they last any longer than 3 hours without actively dissolving.
Of course anglers want to know that their baits are intact and still on when they reel in after perhaps a night of fishing where fish have been naturally feeding well. But how many times do anglers reel in after such a night, using readymade baits, not having had much success? Frankly it amazes me how many anglers are still in the mindset of using whole baits as free baits when it is so massively obvious that fish have had thousands of hours of practice avoiding that bait format and permutations of rigs utilizing that approach.
Most ideally you need to be making homemade baits that are nothing like any readymade popular baits in any way that fish can negatively associate with at all!
You can make then massively more stimulating by not only increasing levels of the most stimulating soluble substances within them, but totally changing the bait format entirely. I will not go into that here, but all I can say is that if you do this, then anglers fishing with readymade baits next to you will be scratching their heads wondering what on earth you are doing that is getting results when they are struggling to get bites - because you can make baits that sensitise fish to your homemade bait, which means other competing baits are noticed much less! This is providing that you do things to them that optimise them for solubility and diffusion.
Think about the most used bait format and avoid it at all costs (i.e. smooth surfaced rounded, pellet or barrel shaped whole hard baits.) Avoid the word boilies and transform your thinking into one of think fish first (and not bait or recipes or bait ingredients first!)
When all the lazy anglers with limited mindsets say to me give me a recipe I just laugh because they have missed what really matters by thousands of miles!
When you think about the relative density of natural food items carp seek out you will notice how much water content is involved and how much soluble substances these foods contain. This thought is a very revealing one I assure you! Do not aim to replicate a snail by making hard baits that can be made by machine. Aim instead to maximise the levels of natural stimuli in baits that are not hard but instead are resilient but soft, maybe even spiky and sharp not smooth, flexible, and even bend and give to pressure from lips of cautiously investigating carp. OK, There is so much more to all this but I will keep this short!
By erasing the word and meaning of the word boilie or even hard or solid pellet out of your fishing mindset, and replacing it with thoughts about how natural food is packed with concentrations of substances carp have evolved to be most sensitive to, then you can make baits than will be natural, move most naturally, not resemble commercial baits, and will out-fish readymade baits with ease! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!
By Tim Richardson.
To make addictive economical homemade baits to out-fish readymade baits of every format including boilies, pellets, pastes, ground baits, spod mixes and more, seize this moment to improve your catches for life with this totally unique powerful series of world-proven fishing bait secrets bibles: "BIG CARP FLAVOURS FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CARP SENSES EXPLOITATION SECRETS!" "BIG CARP AND CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!"
For these and much more unique revealing information NOW VISIT: http://www.baitbigfish.com the home of the world-wide proven homemade bait making and readymade bait success secrets bibles series - make this year your best ever!
The innovative bait and fishing author and bait consultant Tim Richardson is a big carp and catfish angler of over 35 years experience and has been writing, researching and testing material for articles and fishing secrets ebooks for 6 years full-time and helped anglers in 70 plus countries catch new personal best fish.
New Affiliate Tools! http://www.cichlidfishsecrets.com/aff.html This is the original Comprehensive Guide To Keeping & Breeding Cichlids!
The average carp angler thinks and fishes like an average carp angler! Many anglers follow bait fashions and tackle trends and seem to forget that all this is pretty irrelevant compared to the power of really understanding the deeper secrets of the carp themselves that provide genuine short-cuts to success! Read on now to discover much more to improve your catches!
Thinking like carp is an obvious solution to the limited approach that so many average carp anglers have which leads them to fish in copycat stereotypical ways that can actually limit their success! I realise that using the fish as the starting point to your fishing may seem obvious but just how much thought and study does the average carp angler do to improve his catches beyond getting the latest readymade bait someone has recommended in a magazine or on the bank?
Fishing for carp is similar to playing a musical instrument. The more you understand the underlying secrets of how it is designed and why this is, and the more you know about how it works in different contexts and situations, the more you will be able to use it and exploit its basic nature - and play it! You are really aiming to exploit and use everything about carp to make them easier to catch and our thinking and choices about bait is a vital part of the formula for success.
Carp feed much like trout in many ways. But carp are very much filter-feeding and particulate feeding fish while trout definitely appear more like carnivorous hunters, although both fish can opportunistically feed upon other fish such as roach fry.
Carp are of course well known for feeding on the bottom of rivers and lakes, but it is becoming increasingly clear to more carp anglers that carp feed off the bottom far more than might be imagined. This is often in part a result of angling pressure and changing free-baiting methods where the use of ground baiting using bait rockets and spods is very popular. Often carp will exploit the feed on the drop as they know from experience that it is baits lying on the bottom that are the most potentially dangerous.
However, as many as 30 years ago I was catching fish using pop-up baits in the mid-layers and upper layers of water and I did this after reading that carp filter feed on plankton concentrations in the spring and early summer at night so I figured I would exploit this behaviour. Incidentally, it also worked extremely successfully because no-one else I knew often fished at night like this.
In the late eighties I had an enlightening experience using water-soluble PVA tubes from Rod Hutchinson. On one occasion I was using homemade milk protein and fish and marine meal boilies that were quite buoyant. Upon casting out a rig with a bag of small boilies inside an attached PVA tube, I hooked a 25 pound mirror that actually took the bait on the drop.
Such experiences all help you form a picture of carp behaviours and make you realise that carp are always adapting much faster than you might think. I have fished a local farm lake within walking distance from my house which contains probably about 75 small carp. After hooking good numbers of these fish in just a few short 3 to 5 hour visits, these carp have altered their locations and feeding behaviours to an incredible degree and this is only due to my few visits.
The even more amazing this is I have only hooked about half the fish in the lake but all have changed their habits now! It just shows how study of the fish themselves is absolutely essential. I say this because our fishing baits, tackle and activities etc can either work for us, or actually condition carp against us! The more you know how fish behave naturally, the more you can infer when carp are not acting or feeding naturally. Such things can be exploited so the fish begin to behave in ways you want them to and bait formats and designs and thinking and approaches regarding free baiting are a massive art of your potential success!
Carp and trout have much in common in terms of energy requirements which means they seek out the most energy-efficient foods. This in fish terms basically means sources of proteins as well as other nutrition, but protein especially. In fact trout have a higher daily need for protein than carp, and their metabolic rates differ, being higher than carp. This is why feeds for salmonids such as salmon and trout pellets contain more digestible protein and oils than carp actually require.
Now I find this point very much over-looked by far too many carp anglers, but such salmonids pellets and halibut type pellets are as popular free feeds as sweetcorn, if not more so today. Pellets specifically designed for carp are the most suitable free bait for carp and mass use of feeds for other species leads to imbalances in carp health and diseases that can easily shorten life-expectancies (and who really wants that?!)
On most carp waters the fish are consistently consuming enormous amounts of all these free baits without getting hooked. Because so many anglers go fishing now it seems that lots of fish are getting caught. But as in any field of endeavour you will find that the best 20 percent of anglers are more enormously more successful. These guys catch the great majority of the bigger more wary fish. Meanwhile, week after week average anglers are catching relatively few bigger fish (if any at all on some waters.) This leaves them highly frustrated despite them trying all the latest fashionable baits, rigs, tackle and methods in the popular carp magazines!
So how can an average angler improve his catches?! Well I previously mentioned that carp are like trout in certain types of feeding behaviours that have evolved to ensure the highest possibility that their daily essential need for basic energy and nutrition are met. In saying this you might have noticed that certain observations have been made. In most cases, the biggest problem the average angler has is he is stuck in a rut of thinking like an angler. This makes it very much more difficult for him to spot and fish-create catching opportunities and turn failure into success. I know it sounds very glib to say that unconsciously top anglers are thinking like the fish they aim to catch but it is true.
The alignment of thinking means you become more and more tuned in to the actual state of the fish at any given time, such as in different weather conditions in different areas and spots in lakes and rivers at different times of the day and night. Things like light intensity and ambient light at night, moon phases, dissolved oxygen saturation, relative concentrations of natural food at different depths and thermal layering in the water, the detection of fishing lines and free baits and rigs etc all influence behaviours of Mr Carp.
Carp fishing is more than a learned skill as it is most certainly an art form.
Experienced trout anglers know all about how the behaviours of trout can change through the day and they will adjust their approach, their baits and fishing approaches, fishing depths and swims etc accordingly. Any carp angler who has the benefit of an general course fishing and match fishing background has many advantages over anglers who went straight into carp fishing because they will be able to appreciate so much more of the complex web of life and all its interrelated activities unseen underwater.
Just for example, a former trout fisherman (and now a carp angler) may choose to fish just under the line of a wind lane in certain conditions where adults will be emerging and where carp will be very likely feeding. Thinking deeper about natural life and things going on all the time right in front of you reaps big rewards. Even the simple example of the observation of carp feeding ravenously on hatching caddis flies is a good lesson in carp behaviour and location!
Of course knowledge of aquatic insects and hatching in trout fishing is a very important area. You are fishing with artificial flies mimicking the real thing, so choosing models that most suitably approximate natural food is very likely to fool fish into striking at them. All such knowledge can be refined over time, for example, a friend of mine who lived and trout fished in Canada for years once told me he got bored with it because ultimately he could catch all the fish he wanted on any of a select set of just 5 flies!
Obviously he put in the hours to develop his skills and did all the thinking and the related refined fishing practice necessary to gather all the real experience needed to know which flies out of so many would produce the most fish most of the time - and which ones tended to catch the bigger fish too!
Average anglers are just that because they usually have some kind of restraint that prevents them from further achievement. In carp fishing this is probably most often the result of them having a limited mindset about the fish themselves and a more blinkered perception of the natural world when on the bank and this will most likely manifest as a limited pretty stereotypical fishing approach.
There are other reasons to limited success and having the time available to dedicate to fishing is one of the most constricting. Natural talent and ability to develop the skills that provide natural competitive edges over other anglers are other factors. Being an angler who is sponsored with free bait is a huge advantage too but I assure you that even when fishing your own cheap homemade baits you can compete and even out-fish such anglers. (Anyway many bait-sponsored anglers are less gifted than you might think and simply leverage whatever edges they can get to greater effect than many average anglers.)
In the much more heavily angling-pressured competitive environments of many big fish carp waters today other factors matter that give certain anglers huge advantages over others, but lets us focus on things we can change ourselves to improve results!
When anglers being fishing, at least when I began over 30 years ago, we got the most information available about the fish habits and locations and the tackle and skills and baits needed to catch them. It seemed to me rather formulaic and as one of those beginners who read Mr Crabtree cartoons as a boy, I still get flash-back of those cartoons and even quotes from them crossing my mind when discerning spots to fish in swims and when playing unseen big fish. The unconscious mind certainly plays a big part in fishing as all your experiences are brought to bear in any given fishing situation.
At the age of about 8 I was very lucky in that I had a lake containing carp within walking distance near my home that I could walk around and observe. And from 1977 while at secondary school at dinner times, I could spend my time walking around a lake in Essex called Aquatels, (now connected with Solar.) It seems funny now that I have helped inspire someone to form his own bait company to produce and sell successful carp baits to anglers fishing that lake today when I remember hooking fish just on homemade boilies or even bread there all the years when it was still a council run water. (All the best to you Simon - founder of Essex Carp Baits!)
I just mentioned this new bait company because it struck me that the team of people involved with it include anglers who have at least three decades of carp fishing experience and in the case of Martin Gibbinson, 40 years experience. Coming from Essex originally myself I seem to have fished many lakes and pits that the Gibbinson brothers have fished at. I seem to remember Ricky Gibbinson fished Shotgate where I fished for 10 years and Priory Park was one of my original carp waters besides places like Lake Meadows Billericay, Aquatels, Hainault Park, South Weald and others.
I am now located down in southern Kent where there are even more waters to explore including a nearby big pit where apparently Jim Gibbinson fished for its big bream and it now contains some big carp.
One thing you might have noticed about these guys at least from some of their articles, or books of Jim Gibbinson, is the measured ways in which they develop their thinking, tactics, methods, rigs and baiting approaches and so on. Years ago carp were considered an incredible challenge to the sanity of most anglers, but the scientific measurable approach to carp fishing has dramatically made it accessible to the masses and made it into the enormously commercialised cult sport it is today. But despite all the advancements in carp fishing it is still up to the individual angler to develop their own skills and thinking that creates the kinds of catches that they aspire to.
It might not have crossed your mind but the vast majority of high protein natural carp food items contain high water densities. Which baits in particular have very high success rates for big wary fish? The answer of course is balanced pop-up baits and critically-balanced baits that approximate a neutral kind of density so they hover in water and negate the weight of the hook. Of course some angler fish using extra heavy boilies as hook baits and will over-weight their hooks and rigs to make carp suck up the bait much harder to get the hook further back in the mouth to increase hooking potential of rigs with hooks being in the mouth that bit longer too.
The simple example of covering boilies with a paste so they have a softer feel and are more soluble so releasing more attraction than protein-coagulated conventional boilies shows how changing the feel and other characteristics of something familiar leads to improved catches. Carp use danger reference points that we anglers ourselves provide them and these become apparent to them by the repeated use of bait and tackle they have through experience become cautious of added to an instinctive caution of anything foreign situated within their environment.
For instance many carp are wary of relatively hard baits such as popular readymade baits that are universally used straight from the packet. This makes a very good case for making your own unique baits or at the very least for adapting and changing conventional boilies to remove danger reference points as much as possible. Washing out baits prior to fishing is a well-proven edge for wary fish that are highly cautious of fresh baits for instance. Fishing a nutritional non-flavoured homemade bait on the edge of a bed of flavoured readymade baits is another very obvious edge too.
In testing I found that fishing readymade baits on the surface was extremely enlightening. Very often I experienced warier fish actually eye-balling the baits up close and often just taking baits in the corner of their mouth between the lips and pressure-testing them before popping them out again. In such instances following such observations it made good sense to remove familiar bait characteristics to make it more likely the carp would make a mistake. Just cutting baits so they became an odd ribbed shape and soaking them in an unusual natural subtle solution instead really improved results! (Just a few examples are maggot juice, soluble fish protein in solution and liquid mussel extract.) Of course everything you see going on with buoyant baits on the surface is most likely going on with your baits on the bottom too so ringing the changes is essential!
It is still the case that most carp anglers are using round boilies. But on pressured carp waters today if you want to provide carp with a bait format that they have had years to develop skills to avoid then conventional round shaped are the bait to choose. There is nothing wrong with round boilies and they get eaten of course, but in terms of making things easier to catch carp a little thought in terms of carp feeding behaviours is all that is required to improve results. For instance, round boilies tend to follow more a straight line when in the mouth than other shapes such as odd-shaped or square ones. Round baits can be rejected and spat out of the mouth very easily compared to other shapes. Just the act of trimming baits so they resemble some form of natural food item can easily give you an big edge!
Boilies often work on a rig much more effectively with a live bait like a worm or maggots. Again, how many anglers do this to get around the familiarity carp have with dealing just with conventional round boilies on a rig? It sounds so obvious and such ideas are often called alternative in magazines but to me alternative thinking approaches really need to be your prime approaches for wary fish because most hard-fished carp waters are now packed with wary fish!
Adapting or altering your bait format is one angle of approach but your bait design itself is an edge of incredible potential power and genuinely deserves far more attention in regards to exploiting essential carp needs and vital senses to catch many more fish! (For much more information see my website and biography right now!)
By Tim Richardson.
Now why not seize this moment to improve your catches for life with these unique fishing bibles: "BIG CARP FLAVOURS FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CARP SENSES EXPLOITATION SECRETS!" "BIG CARP AND CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" For these and much more now visit: http://www.baitbigfish.com the home of the world-wide proven homemade bait making and readymade bait success secrets bibles and further more advanced articles for beginners and emore experienced carp and catfish anglers alike!
