Vital Ingredients For Carp Fishing Success And Secret Big Fish Bait Recipes!
baitbigfish
Imagine if you had a simple magic bullet solution to improve your catches! Many really do exist but can you spot them and do you know how and when to apply them?! You do not have to be an expert angler to magically realise some of them because I have done the work for you in this revealing article based on my 32 years of making carp baits and fishing for big carp (even hooking an old world record carp!) so read on and catch more fish than ever before!
Maybe you are well and truly into using readymade carp baits like I have been on and off in my fishing for over 30 years. You probably catch the majority of your fish on readymade baits and that is what a fair percentage of carp anglers do too. What if I confessed that I made it a point of mine to fish on waters using the established going baits but change it to exploit all the expensive baiting going on around me so my own adapted baits did much better than others – for a fraction of the cost? For me the biggest advantage of bait is its potential capacity for getting around fish caution – the biggest block to you catching every fish in the lake most of the time.
Over the years I have fished with most of the readymade baits you have and even field tested ingredients, liquids and new readymade baits for a number of bait companies both large and small. It has become very obvious that the fact that when a bait or product is new, different, and offering unusual attraction signals to the fish, these baits are very likely to hook some of the wariest often the oldest and most cautious fish.
On the other hand, once a readymade bait has become established and enough fish have already been hooked on it, although the fish are looking for it and eating it they can easily be more cautious when feeding on due to factors such as previous hooking, or the ability of fish to transmit or communicate the fact that baits, hook baits or baited spots in swims for example are dangerous. It can be the case on many waters where fish will move into a swim and the pecking order sorts out which kinds of fish will first test the baits or not as the case may be. Sometimes these fish could well be ones that have developed more skills at avoiding hook baits and are used by other fish as detector fish.
Having seen such behaviours on a number of waters it seems to me that consistently using new baits really is a massive advantage in hooking improved numbers of lesser caught warier fish which happen to often be older and heavier than their younger brethren. Of course sometimes the oldest fish are smaller than the other fish in a lake but usually such fish are experienced enough to avoid getting hooked more than most.
I repeat this fact so you will notice it and appreciate it a bit more – new baits very often hook the larger warier fish sooner rather than later! One example is when I did a bit of fishing at Darenth over a 2 year period around 2002 2003 and did rubbish using popular readymade baits. Yet immediately I used my own homemade baits I hooked very big fish – for me this just proved how suspicious of popular familiar baits carp can become. Often the guys who did very well on there often had a kind of network of friends informing them of spots and fish movements and bivvy-hopped into going swims, or could afford to use crazy amounts of baits. I had neither advantage and simply made do with using small amounts of readymade baits and hooked relatively few fish as a result.
This experience having done so well on waters elsewhere since the eighties using my more economical baits homemade baits seriously made me think! I realised hoe lazy I had become and had fed into this group-consciousness thing of just grabbing baits off the shelf and expecting miracles to happen. Instant anglers can buy everything and go and catch big carp even though they may be complete beginners.
But to keep on consistently catching the big fish right through the year against very talented extremely experienced anglers who really understand carp, what makes their baits work and how to maximise these effect, is a different ball game altogether. All I had done at Darenth was forget my strengths and tried to fit in with the crowd, be a buy off the shelf and expect miracles instant type of angler – a big mistake! Ironically enough the biggest fish I hooked there were all hooked by fishing my baits and rigs differently to what I had observed other anglers doing. I know for a fact that the biggest fish I lost there was the prized little leather – a mid-fifty today.
One of the worst things you can do in carp fishing on a highly competitive water when struggling is keep on asking for advice and trying to copy other more successful anglers. This might at first sound strange, but doing this simply means you are trying to copy the personal style of someone else instead of developing your own! This really means you are giving away your best strengths. For instance, if someone was doing well fishing maggots in PVA bags or using stick mixes and fake baits or spodding out ground bait and fishing long zig rigs at range, this all does not mean you should copy them at all.
Always remember that these baits and methods are most successful when new, when carp are less cautious of them. Therefore doing your own thing, think for yourself to problem solve and you will be the winner because what you do and use with inevitably solve problems in different and unique ways that get around the cautions of fish much more effectively than baits and methods the carp are already cautious of. In the eighties one method I did very well on was fishing a double pop-up bait at long range, or using a PVA string tied and coiled extra long hook link at range. I combined the best of the readymade baits and ingredients I could harness to use them creatively in different ways to my maximum advantage. Often this involved using only small amounts of unusual homemade baits. A tip here is that carp do not merely feed utilising senses of smell or sight, but many other senses many anglers are far less aware of being able to either manipulate or exploit deliberately through bait design.
You can circumnavigate what other anglers are using very easily and impose your own unique fishing style strengths. For example, on one particular day ticket water that I fished occasionally in 2005 and some of 2006, the local anglers were predominantly using Mainline, Nutrabaits and Carp Company readymade boilies (plus others.) At the time this water was renowned for having a few superb common carp plus some mirror carp weighing over forty pounds. Some were old English fish bought from a water nearby plus some apparently Polish imports, plus others which had been in the lake a few years and had grown on. I was told that the big fish did not get caught easily and was warned by the bailiffs and owner was a tough lake.
This new water to me was many miles away from where I lived and was very expensive to fish. Therefore I had to maximise my efforts in preparation in advance of fishing by using short non-fishing reconnoitring visits during the late winter and early spring. My main goal was just to catch one of the big commons and I did a lot of watching the water and making notes on literally everything about the lake before actually fishing. I studied the baits going in, the popular rigs and methods being used, the lake features, the unpopular swims and mainly un-fished areas; I observed fish habits and their timed movements and so on.
I put little faith in what the regular local anglers said because often it was designed to put other anglers off fishing the water – and especially because it appeared that they were not ripping the place apart and called the place hard even though it was so small a water. Whenever a lake is called hard by regulars it is worth considering that the local regular anglers and their fishing habits are normally the main things that over longer or shorter periods of time have conditioned the fish to behave and feed in the ways they do! Also it does seem pretty obvious that new anglers get beginner luck as it were simply due to fishing new baits and different methods and fishing styles to which the fish respond to more confidently at least initially. More often than not local anglers get into ruts and tend to stick to baits and methods that have worked previously.
But in competitive pressured waters this approach is very likely to suffer from the fact that fish can react to successful baits and tactics extremely quickly! For instance at one water I fished and did extremely well on it only took the fish about 6 weeks of regular hammerings to adapt and start avoiding the baits, rigs and approaches I was initially using. Soon baited areas were being avoided and fish hooked off the baited areas were far less well hooked, or even lost during fights showing the fish were feeding without the confidence of previous weeks! In response I used totally new baits and approaches and this immediately kicked off the hammerings yet again. I know that if I had continued to plug away with the same old baits, tactics etc I could easily have fallen into the mindset of saying the lake was really hard! It shocked me that a simple change of baits could begin again the successful capture of big wary fish
My main point about all this preparation for this new water was to develop a mind set that would help me impose my own strengths on the water – as opposed to listening to wildly conflicting advice from numerous anglers each with their own personal fishing styles and favourite baits, swims and ways of interpreting the lake and how to approach it!
All my preparation was basically to save me loads of money and time so I could exploit the full weight of all I had learnt from fishing previous waters and to especially to choose which baits to apply, how to design them for this water, when and where to fish and how best to exploit what the other anglers were inducing fish to expect! The vast majority of anglers were fishing over beds of halibut pellets or ground bait formats etc or using free offering boilies mixed with other baits fed en mass or gradually through their sessions. Basically I sought to do everything from the perspective of the fish as in what would I avoid – and what would I be much more confident feeding on and why!
Looking at the readymade baits being introduced I listed as many of the known ingredients as possible that I knew from my contacts and personal investigations in regard to them. The ingredients, additives, liquids etc all in effect impact on fish providing reasons for them to consume or at least test baits. It is obviously a great idea in some ways to avoid as many of these substances as possible and present fish with different substances and reasons to try your baits.
Of course another approach is to top familiar baits, for example by making up a readymade base mix of a popular readymade baits and making adjustments to its profile, taste, smell etc to make it a new but semi-familiar bait that fish will be more confident of feeding on. There I go again – new baits catch fish out! I know that the classic baiting pyramid thing is a great tool to exploit but it is not the only thing to exploit!
Fish are individuals and are genetically unique individuals. When you get your head around that one you will see the power of using new and different unique baits instead of just plugging away with one all the time. In fact it amazes me just how many anglers consistently fish 3 rods all with identical baits and then they moan if they blank. You cannot always blame the bait for failure to catch of course, it could be an electromagnetically-caused dead spell when fish simply are not feeding, or it could simply be impacts of fishing pressure by anglers or even blunt hooks (I make my hooks manually sharper than any chemically-sharpened hook on the market with good reason!)
In my preparations for this new water I also noted what aquatic plant life and proteinous benthic and other natural foods were available – and tried to figure out why they were present and where they were concentrated where they were. It really struck me most that a key advantage would be to discover what vital nutrition normally supplied by certain natural foods may be lacking at certain times of year. As it turned out this lake was extremely deficient in aquatic plant life and this could be exploited in the nutrition supplied in my bait design.
Some natural hints can really help sometimes, such as finding tiny mussels and snails on weed reeled in, finding small clear more immature or larger more mature bloodworms wound in on your rig from a silt bed, or seeing large swan mussels in the margins, or finding an area of silk weed in a swim for example. Even clean patches of clean clay in different colours can yield interesting nutritional findings (these are especially rich in minerals and do get eaten by carp too!) Another major point was investigating the possibility that the baits that were being applied were over-supplying many essential nutrients and actually could be leaving a gap in key factors in the diet of the fish at vital moments in the yearly growth cycle of the natural food blooms etc.
It had long been thought by many of those guys who began carp fishing before readymade carp baits became readily available around 1983 with Richworth freezer baits, that spring time was a good time for lower protein carbohydrate based baits and other baits packed with nutrition and factors other than just proteins and amino acids. These included bird food baits of course but a diverse range of baits was being used by homemade bait-making anglers.
At the time many readymade boilie base mixes were being offered along with flavours and all manner of base mix ingredients, additives, enhancers, special liquids, appetite stimulators and so on. Because there was so much to choose from and much of the time I was aiming to make every fish worth every penny I spent on bait I often created baits that technically would seem pretty weird to say the least today.
Much of the time I was adapting readymade mixes because I know the amino acid and other nutritional contents and profiles of baits would be completely acceptable to fish instantly – without an flavours. I used many readymade base mixes with nothing added – just lake water, and used pastes much of the time. Over all I found that using a higher percentage of eggs for hook baits and just water for free baits was a consistently successful method but then due to my insistence on spending as little on bait as possible to make each fish as economical as possible I really enjoyed experimenting with a huge range of things that cost less and often were not found on bait shop shelves.
This practice has obviously stayed with me to this day – and why not especially in the current economic down-turn?! One of the most surprising breakthroughs for me in the early eighties was discovering that a cheap bait did not have to be made using semolina (hard durum wheat) combined with soya flour. Bear in mind that at the time I was only a few miles from waters like those at the Darenth complex. This really was a crucible of bait development and bait testing by many of the top anglers in the UK who at the time or later went on to found many of the well-known bait companies of today.
For example for those in the know you might wonder just what the true and original origins of Nutrabaits Hi-Nu-Val (I have it excellent authority its origins were not Nutrabaits but 2 poor Darenth lads who have never been rewarded with so much as a penny – they should never have trusted someone who had been jailed for fraud!) Well I tried and tested this milk protein bait along with many other similar types of baits, enzymes, carbonates, acids and enhancers, feeding stimulants etc including milk protein baits from Rod Hutchinson, John Baker and others. As you can imagine, I was up against the calibre of guys who could literally import all kinds of top grade milk proteins, digestible fish meals, and marine extracts from Asia and so on.
In the early eighties I first discovered that when you are against highly experienced anglers who are on the sly baiting up in groups and keeping what they are doing to themselves you need some sort of edge – especially when you are fishing as a single angler! It did not take too long to realise that to catch the bigger fish from under the noses of these guys I too had to find my own bait edges. However I certainly did not have the monetary budget or group buying power these guys had.
In a way this situation is similar to a single angler fishing against dominant groups and bait company-sponsored anglers today. But I had one thing - they did not have my personal creative imagination. I read up on human nutrition and discovered that we are long-lost descendants of carp and share many metabolic and physiological similarities that could be translated into choices of ingredients and methods of applying baits in different ways to normal. Basically fish like us are dependant upon bacteria to digest food in our gut and we are not solely reliant upon digestive enzymes – even though we humans are warm-blooded not cold-blooded.
Carp are in certain ways far more efficient with their food than us because they do not waste energy maintaining body temperature, and use highly evolved energy-efficient bodies and fins to glide through water supported by a balancing swim bladder. We humans use loads of energy just staying upright, maintaining our muscle tone etc and walking about etc under the stress of gravity.
It turned out that fish are extremely good at utilising proteins, but them how many Cyprinus carpio carp can you find in the wild that do not subsist the majority of the time on protein-rich as opposed to carbohydrate rich foods? The basic human body has evolved to survive on carbohydrates foods were protein is scarce and supplement protein through plants and other means.
When you ponder on it a bit, just how to cows, elephants or gorillas get their protein – I think this is a vital question. (This relates in many ways to the fact that similar types of bacteria in various concentrations are found in carp gills, in lake water, lake bed sediment and in the carp gut and gut walls.)
OK so some of this is taking things further than you maybe want to go right now but it brings up another vitally important aspect of fish and that is how they actually detect their potential food items in the first place – and how do they adjust their methods and modes of feeding plus adjust their gill rakers, in order to most efficiently feed!
Being aware of natural modes of carp behaviours and the stages these can takes in response to various stimuli is extremely useful to know and knowing about carp sensitivities in this and how baits interract with water itself is extremely powerful stuff and things as an ebook author I have covered as this subject is potent to say the least!
Going back to my early eighties challenge fishing against groups of anglers with seriously effective baits such as the latest enzyme-active balanced amino acid profile baits, I simply kept using different baits and trying consistently different approaches every few weeks or many times a week each time I went fishing at that particular water (for over a 10 year period.) Due to my constant experimentation using a vast diversity of common and very unique substances, baits and methods, countless creative and theoretical bait lessons were discovered – along with the capture of the new lake record fish at 35 pounds on my last ever session along with about 20 fish averaging just under 20 pounds in a weeks fishing (circa October 1991.)
Now going back to the new water I mentioned earlier where I had done all the preparatory investigations, thinking and bait designing. Sometimes you only get one chance on a water such as when going abroad and fishing a new just for a week. I can tell you that now I have absolute confidence in what bait designs I would not only fish anywhere but fish against any readymade or homemade bait, but then I have literally spend the last 6 years full-time investigating baits, carp and catfish senses and commonly-known and new substances and their fish impacts and water-related impacts.
During my first couple of years of doing this I occasionally fished the new water mentioned before and used new unique baits on every single occasion. The top angler there was a local angler who basically visited the place during his dinner hours etc, spotted where baits were going in and where fish were located, and then directly exploited this local advantage and fresh intelligence to great effect.
But he kept catching the same handful of forties in repeat captures and cloud not figure out how it was how I had nearly caught all the much sought-after forties from this lake on the homemade baits I exploited, while he was catching the same 4 fish repeatedly using Mainline Maple bait and his trusty halibut pellets. In contrast I landed 9 distinctly different forties plus recaptures and a few losses at the net due to over-sharpening my hooks – and giving a fishing rod with a big fish on occasions to my girlfriend so she could experience the fun of fishing! On my last ever trip there he had been fishing and had blanked for carp.
The day temperatures were in the nineties and he and the bailiffs were expecting me to only to catch tench too but this was not the case and I landed two twenties and a final forty which obviously was an ill fish with a massively enlarged liver – due to all the high oil pellets which I totally recommend anglers stop using because of their serious long-term health issues – plus their negative impacts in allowing carp to more or less complexly stop feeding during much of the winter and early spring and survive on stored fat reserves! High oil baits are only really suitable for when carp metabolism is at its peak – outside of these times the constant mass use of oily baits is downright harmful to carp and on winter and spring fishing.
Most so-called bulk oils used in carp baits are best used at only 5 percent of the bait – The irresponsible oily glugging of baits is simply not on except when the fish are at maximum levels of activity! To recommend this method outside of these times is pure ignorance. Bulk oils such as fish oils and oily halibut pellets are not suitable for carp except when their metabolism is at its peak – and not many anglers can read the conditions and temperatures when this really is! Such oily baits are only suitable for fish with much higher rates of metabolism per rise in temperature increments – e.g. catfish, sea fish and salmonids such as salmon and trout – all with higher metabolisms than carp!
Next time you land a big carp and are dismayed by the bulging liver sticking out of the side of it remember it is anglers and their oily pellets most of all that is doing this to the fish! (On a related note, it is a well-known fact among top nutritionists today that the average human in the UK has a liver roughly twice the size of people living 100 years ago – mainly due to the forms of foods predominantly eaten today.
Do not forget that your liver is like a clearing house of everything going through the body and the less stress you put on it the more natural vitality and potential longevity you will have. In terms of carp baits a large number of ingredients, extracts and other substances really do make a difference to your catches because use of them results in more bites, raised fish metabolism, better appetites and better health – carp are not stupid when it comes to food even if they do gorge on tiger nuts or peanuts etc with addictive substances we can exploit in other healthier ways in fishing bait design!
Ultimately the link between fishing baits, carp and prevention and cure humans diseases and peak vitality, health and longevity are inextricably linked! I hope you enjoy my ebooks –and get creative in your fishing and use you bait knowledge to make you and your family healthier and happier!
In terms of fishing baits, carp nutrition is far from just about proteins and amino acids, or water pH and flavours, or palatability factors or tricking fish senses in more conventional ways. The true feeding triggers aspect of baits is an enormously important part of bait design, but when combined with other aspects of baits that trigger other senses you really can maximise fish responses in many different situations.
For instance you can make a bait that is especially prebiotic and probiotic to maximise digestion or make baits that cause vibrations that shoot through the water triggering keen carp sensitivities to vibrations (that also fish use to detect concentrations of moving plankton and bloodworms etc.) You can exploit their sensitivities to things such as subtle electric fields eminating from objects and even rigs and baits, and you can harness and exploit carp retinal cells and so on sensitivities to near infra-red and ultraviolet in some very obvious or hidden ways, and so on.
If you are new to the subject of baits and how many aspects of them actually induce feeding, then the secrets of simple or more complex bait formulation, flavours and feeding triggers (including many other substances) are massive edges in catching more carp and bigger carp; even when exploiting readymade boilies, pellets, particles and stick and spod mixes and even maggots!
By Tim Richardson.
Article submitted Thursday, January 28, 2010 & read 89 times.
He has been published in carp and catfish magazines in Holland, USA, Denmark, Germany, UK, Spain, South Africa plus online, and is a member of the well respected 'British Carp Study Group. Find many more free articles and free ebook extracts plus ebook details at his specialist website: http://www.baitbigfish.com
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