Making Homemade Carp Baits That Make You Money!
Today with the recession and ever rising costs, there is no better time to exploit making your own unique fishing baits to take full control and increase your budget-savings, choose your exact ingredients and levels you want to exploit, and to experience the amazing satisfaction of catching new personal best fish (on your very own budget-price, secret homemade baits!) There is far more to exploit than just bait flavours however and the majority of carp anglers when discussing their favourite flavours and readymade bait brands never truly get to appreciate and exploit the proven potential of much less well known carp feeding triggers, ingredients, additves, incitants, enhancers and so on, and continue to accept average catches and miss a gigantic advantage available to everyone with open eyes and ears! So if you want to save a fortune in bait in the coming years and wish to improve you fishing results and be able to leverage homemade bait-making to maximum effect " read on!
The growing numbers of anglers in the UK and all around the world reflect a movement towards the desire of anglers to take back control over every aspect of their fishing and the desire to understand more complete details about bait and actually how it works in relation to carp diet and senses etc that in the past has been largely ignored by the majority who have been dependant upon readymade baits! When I began carp fishing in the nineteen-seventies everyone made their own baits out of necessity and it really was a challenge to find appropriate and accurate information about what exactly made carp feed and what fulfilled their essential nutritional requirements that you could actually get hold of and use in homemade baits, but all this experience and knowledge has meant our homemade baits can hold their own and even out-fish popular brand readymade boilies. Homemade baits have always if so desired been a tremendously effective economical and unique edge in carp fishing, (being different is vital to constant success of course,) it is very easy to forget that the relatively few truly knowledgeable bait designers with the big bait companies all started out at home in their own kitchens or garden sheds!
Perceptions have changed in carp fishing to an unbelievable degree in recent years; my own twenty fish caught in the UK over forty pounds would be very average on some crazily-priced impossible to get into carp syndicates today, but the fact is that if your goal is big fish, you must fish waters containing them or never achieve your goals at least until the fish you have present access to grow that size if they ever do that is! Many limiting factors are involved in both bait details and fishing itself; commonly it is lack of time and good waters, (or restricted access to them,) exorbitant membership or day ticket prices or bait costs involved in truly being able to establish a bait on a water for an average angler that limits catch results very severely that results in average or lower than average yearly catches for average anglers. Obviously if you are a sponsored angler, in the tackle and bait trades, are a full-time angler, or have the time and resources, or personal support and contacts available etc (which can all come into the equation of success) then your chances of carp fishing success can be far higher than the average.
Most of us have to compete with bait and tackle-sponsored anglers and having the ability to either top their baits or make your own is a very potent edge in such circumstances! Also the willingness to constantly adapt your thinking and develop your personal fishing skills and take risks with your fishing styles and approaches provides endless competitive edges that stuck in a rut carp anglers who follow fashions and the crowd miss all the time. The obvious answer to how to beat the herd is to be the first to do something different in terms of baits and methods; in making your own baits and developing your own approaches you always improve your chances " permanently and you will be a true thinking angler and a genuine sharper carper!
Although beginning in carp bait making is like starting junior school again - when you are really competing against bait companies (and individuals) who are exploiting professionals with PhDs in food science, fish nutrition, electrochemistry and so on, you can be certain your efforts will pay-off, big-time! Although certain anglers will rave-on about a balanced nutritional value bait being as fully digestible as possible and sorted down the third limiting amino acid level, you may noticed that over 90 percent of all carp caught in the world are not caught on such baits; this is because only a handful of well-connected bait designers can actually produced baits to this effect! The nutritional, metabolic and health impacts of a fast and efficiently digested bait cannot be under-estimated however; it figures that the more energy a fish has available after eating baits and the more a bait offers in potential rewards that carp detect in them, the more chances you have of fish actually mouthing baits and consuming them repeatedly " with more chances of captures than very many competing baits perhaps with much less to offer (view my unique ebooks on bait design and making at Baitbigfish for more!)
Talking to average carp anglers on the bank just shows how much they are missing out on tremendously better catches if only they knew more about bait than references to their favourite flavours or brands; this it a tragedy because everyone can get better educated about bait design and exploitation and leverage bait to much greater effect than they ever previously imagined. Many anglers have heard of balanced or high nutrition baits or so-called food baits, and having the knowledge to be able improve the performances of all kinds of carp baits, from particles to pellets to boilies to ground baits etc by leveraging potent natural feeding triggers in particular is hugely beneficial to multiplying your catches! The digestibility of carp baits is very much an edge and most anglers know next to nothing about how this is achieved and why it is such a powerful advantage over fish and most competing baits in the long-term, producing the biggest fish that incidentally require the highest energy requirements repeatedly!
Of course flavours are such a popular subject for carp anglers, but most realise that the majority of flavours are just average or worse while a relative few are very potent by comparison to others and really do work, if not directly in effecting feeding responses, then indirectly helping enhance and improve ionising effects of other bait substances such as betaine and amino acids and so on etc! Some very most effective flavours are the type that by methodically testing against standard baits you can overdose and top standard baits so they catch far more fish at almost any water you visit than the very same standard bait from the same bag but with no extra added flavour, but please be aware that anything has a flavours of some sort even plastic and rubber baits, and carp can detect some substances to a few parts in a billion (this is fact.) Although chilli extracts are very popular few anglers rally appreciate the many aspects of their impacts upon fish senses, digestion and metabolism, long range chemoreception and lateral line sensitivities and mode of feeding they can induce and so on; it may come as a big surprise that carp actually enjoy the pleasure from the pain response initiated by the hot peppers " just as we enjoy hot curries and spicy foods for the same reason (see my flavours and feeding triggers ebooks for more!)
In my opinion the best starting point in making homemade baits, is to get to really become familiar with many of the natural feeding triggers carp are most sensitive to, from monophosphates, amino acids, (and other amines) similes and analogues of natural substances etc; then seek out the very highest quality products available that contain these for bait use at a reasonable price. There are many hidden factors in sourcing ingredients, such as taste enhancers or squid extracts that have been cut with cheaper products and constant experimentation is the key to outstanding results; but this is the learning curve that literally everyone that makes new baits is on. It is very possible for the beginner to boost a simple homemade 50:50 soya and semolina boilie base mix by the addition of high levels of a additives or ingredients that will supply many potent feeding triggers; such as fermented shrimp powder, de-fatted green-lipped mussel extract, enzyme-treated liver powder, abalone powder, Ccmoore Feedstim XP powder etc; these will make all the difference, so do yourself a big favour and find out more " and my unique bait secrets ebooks (at Baitbigfish) make very stimulating reading!
By Tim Richardson.