Monday, May 25, 2009

Carp Fishing Bait Secrets For Your Best Catch Ever!

By Tim Richardson

Many more new carp anglers swell the ranks of already heavily-pressured carp waters each year, and any tips and tricks and insights that give you edges other anglers and their baits, preferably saving you loads of money too, are very valuable! You will find some powerful insights and home truths about how to catch more carp for less money by maximising baits far more to their full potential and keeping full control over their impacts on carp and how much they cost!

You might think fish location is the most important factor in carp fishing, or a sharp hook, but my testing with big heavy blunt hooks, and random choice of old baits shows that neither in the absence of any application of watercraft nor any resemblance of an effective rig, big carp still wind up getting hooked! I used to think very conventionally that fish location is paramount followed by a very sharp hook on a proven rig for the occasion, but my results using basically rotten bait presentations in swims and areas looking about as unfavourable for a carp as possible, and using some of the most weird-smelling odd-looking old baits showed that unusual new bait is more than likely far more important and influential to success than first presumed!

When testing one friends successful ground bait mix by feeding fish 3 versions of it in a stock pond at Horseshoe Lake the difference between the carp responses to his bait and my 2 new versions were staggering. In fact my friend was a bailiff and was a top rod on that lake using his own recipe of homemade spod mix. But when introduced to stock pond carp beside my versions of his own spod mix, his mix was completely ignored and was left untouched, and meanwhile carp actually head-butted the bottom in search of the other new versions, (this was even after they had all been consumed!)

What occurred and the severe black and white result of the spod baits test came as a big shock to my friend who simply could not understand why his best spod mix had been left there on the bottom completely untouched by obviously very stimulated carp, tench and roach. I had expected to be able to improve on the performance and response strength of his spod mix by adding the potent substances chosen but I did not really believe myself that these would completely stop the original bait from being eaten at all and this was a shock to me too as the implications are very powerful and far-reaching indeed. If you ever fish next to someone and fail to catch on what is your best bait or a formerly very successful bait you might well question what it is doing or not doing and how it has been designed (or not) to specifically impact on your fishes senses and other systems...

Even though many believe in the high and balanced nutritional bait approach or the instant bait approach and any permutation in between, what ultimately matters from a results point is that you get a hook into a mouth in order to hook it, but obviously this is nowhere as simple as it might sound and success in this varies by miles between different baits. There is also the phenomenon of so many anglers free baits being regularly consumed while hook baits get rejected, and even put aside or marked as a potential threat by carp communicating between each other in various ways in a baited swim. Many anglers talk about carp having to get hooked because in order to sample baits they need to pick them up and chew them, but the fact is much of the substance of a bait in water can be identified and even filter-fed upon without a carp ever actually touching a bait let alone actually taking it into the mouth and consuming it.

The number of carp on any water that respond far better to new and unique baits that have not been experienced by carp before shows the extent to which carp instinctive cautionary defence mechanisms for survival operate and homemade baits and ground baits are especially ideal for enabling any ordinary angler to keep ahead of the crowd and pressured carp!

By being able to make your own baits and adapt readymade baits you control many vital aspects of bait, from the ways they impact on carp senses, rate of metabolism and feeding and digestion, to your all important bait cost itself! Picture the effect on carp of being able to introduce free baits with far high levels of natural feed-triggering substances than bait companies can afford to sell profitably and the results you will be able to achieve! Probably the most obvious example for this cold water period is the possibility of including far higher levels of the famous green lipped mussel extract and betaine hydrochloride for instance which are very well proven to keep carp feeding more strongly and more repeatedly for longer, thus giving you far more chances of bites and hooked fish...

Just the popularity of one substance such as betaine shows that one substance that carp are naturally highly stimulated by can have a big improvement in catches, but there are many other substances to exploit in many various ways. Just as betaine and corn steep liquor are used in powder and soluble liquid forms you can apply this to a vast multitude of other substances you might never have considered before. The successful permutations and combinations are truly endless always keeping you ahead of those ever changing and adapting carp.

Anyone in the know when it comes to fishing baits, truly appreciates that outstanding catches are very much linked to the ability of an angler to control and maintain the concentration of excitory substances in close proximity to their hook baits, and knowledge of certain aspects of homemade bait making really do help in achieving this even with adapted readymade baits and ground baits! Try fishing with a PVA bag of whole readymade boilies compared to a bag of readymade boilies opened 3 days before use and crumbled and chopped and soaked in a feed-triggering PVA-friendly complex and cast out in a PVA bag holding a PVA-friendly glug too; the results are pretty different to say the least! But perhaps the biggest wake-up call of all is not merely the ability to control how your baits impact strongly on your fish and control swims etc, but the ability to control your spending by being able to spend on those ingredients, additives and so on with the most impact on fish; so requiring less bait but producing improved effects; with the best part being your shocking money savings!

By Tim Richardson.

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