Now we are in the grip of a world-wide recession we need to look for economical ways to improve our fishing results. As carp fishing has become such a cult sport the prices of products has risen often at the expense of genuine quality. If you want to use baits the quality of which you can be sure of and at a price that better suits your budget, and compete with far more expensive readymade baits, here is some sound advice on making your own. (By a carp angler of 30 plus year experience.)

Recently there has been a lot of bait discussion in the glossy magazines and elsewhere about the impact of protein (amino acids in particular) and bait digestibility. What this is all about is trying to maximise the ingredients and liquids in your bait to get the best feeding response from carp and to provide the maximum nutritional reward to carp for eating a bait as possible by the most complete bait digestion possible. Sorry if this is rather ahead of many of you reading this; we will get back to basics very shortly. There will be some suggestions for some very effective homemade bait formulation coming up!

The modern carp bait industry is crammed with bait companies who very often have recipes that work, but do not really know how to fully exploit the natural nutritional stimulation of the individual ingredients and complete biological value of ingredients when combined together. Of course all this is very complicated stuff and it really can lead to proven consistent big fish results. Having mentioned the protein side of bait the full nutritional impacts of the most essential and stimulatory amino acids side of things in baits is estimated to be only built into a tiny percentage of commercially available readymade baits today.

Instant high concentrated flavour level baits are another matter entirely; these will most depend upon your personal talent, developed skills and experience to most exploit these. True balanced nutritional style carp baits have the edge in that once established any beginner can expect to catch the biggest fish using them and results really keep coming for a long period of time compared to instant baits. Instant baits need to be changed when carp have associated one particular one with danger; it is not difficult at all for them to do this as the base and components of a highly concentrated flavour can easily be detected and instant baits might well have 30 millilitres of flavouring or more when compared to nutritional value bait which may contain 2 millilitres or none at all.

Natural feeding trigger-based nutritional bait recipes do not need flavours because the base mix and liquid foods contains all the stimulatory feeding triggers, attractors, taste-enhancers and so on intrinsically within the bait already. Many will be very subtle in smell and taste but even more effective for wary fish as a result. For example, anglers can tell you what the most effective amino acids are for triggering the olfactory system of a carp, and few can tell you which will trigger the gustatory system either – or say which ones trigger both or which combinations of these will trigger both. However it is pretty obvious that natural food items carp have evolved their digestive systems to exploit through evolution provide the most obvious answers to such questions.

Anyone snorkelling in an average lake will find a variety of carp foods; From caddis fly larvae and aquatic worms, tubifex and bloodworm (and countless other insect larvae,) to all kinds of molluscs and crustaceans; from shrimps, snails, mussels and so on. Carp filter feed much of their food especially at the warming spring period from the naturally incredibly rich soup of plankton and phytoplankton or algae abundant in the water layers. Carp senses are so sensitive they can actually hear the sounds eminating from concentrations of plankton. When night feeding for example, such senses really enabling gorging upon what might appear to be invisible food sources. In fact often when it seems carp are not feeding they are feeding on the move and actively seeking out the highest concentrations of plankton; carp will harvest algae from everything suitable in their environment all their life – it is that rich!

Of course there are other foods sources including the base rock, mud, silt etc forming the lake bed, bacterially digested and fresh flotsam and organic matter of many kinds, and carp absorb levels of various essential nutrients directly into their bodies through their skin. For all too many carp angers still today, the question of bait is often raised regarding that of flavours. This is manifested most frequently in the bankside question of which flavour bait other anglers are using. Many anglers refer to the brand name of a bait they might be using too.

Often the effect of clever marketing and so on means that a poor quality bait is introduced in such great volumes into a water, and used by so many anglers, that it seems to be the best bait for a certain period of time. A great bait will catch on and on with very minor tweaks to keep it ahead of fish already caught on it and there are many of these on offer, but the best do not come cheap. Great examples include those from Ccmoore, Future Baits, Bait Craft, Essential Baits, Cotswold Baits and CW Baits.

These baits are designed in regard to maximum energy efficiency and matching attraction characteristics which carp will most derive benefit and stimulation from; both in terms of internal and external sensory systems, and biological conversion into tissues, growth, repair and energy itself for metabolism. Not many companies can design baits with regard to first, second and third limiting amino acids but it is only right to include some of the ones that have the knowledge and knowledge and experience to do this to produce exceptional baits.

On a natural food basis, when you realise that carp are a direct reflection of the foods and more energy-efficient substances and nutrition that sustains their very survival, it is no surprise that all manner of natural foods are rich in bait ingredients and additives that we hear so much about today. In this regard I refer to some of the most potent chemosensory carp stimulants such as the betaine in mussels, or the levels of essential amino acids in bloodworm or shrimps for example. Lysine is the amino acid against which many others are measured in various ways simply because in nature it is very most deficient in so many food items and must be supplemented in various ways within a carp bait alongside other essential nutrition; not just other amino acids either.

One factor that is telling is the digestibility of most very significant natural carp food items. For a start they have a high water content and being so hydrated are easier for the carp digestive system – it being evolved directly for maximising the digestion and assimilation of such food items. The digestibility of fly larvae, bloodworm, earthworms, snails, mussels, algae and so on, is extremely high indeed. The vast majority of boilies and pellets cannot boast a fraction of this level of digestibility and this in effect means that the majority of these baits is passed out of carp as undigested waste matter.

This is not a great situation especially in smaller over-stocked waters with lower levels of natural food as harmful nitrogen levels can build up which can affect water quality and the entire ecosystem of a water and the creatures within it. DEFRA is the UK government body controlling farming. The amount of ruling regarding natural and artificial fertilizers and leaching of their nitrogen into water courses, natural springs, underground aquifers etc, demonstrates how important this is to avoid. Nitrogen affects all kinds of things and the balance of oxygen saturation and carbonic acid in waters all year round and the balanced growth of algae and aerobic and non-aerobic bacteria is critical to fish health and growth as well as to their natural food!

But now back to designing baits made at home! (Well actually, if you do not want to make baits but want a bait unique to yourself, you could design and test a bait and supply your own unique base mix ingredients the ingredients to one of the excellent bait rolling companies available.) This way is even better some might argue than using an adapted or topped commercial bait company mix. This way you can be totally confident your bait is going to be exactly what you want, and work exactly how you designed it. You will be secure in the knowledge that you know no-one else can ever compete against you using your mix and only you will know exactly what it contains that provides its edges over the carp and competing baits! (You have total control over your costs, quality and freshness of all liquid and dry ingredients and additives, etc.)

Being different is only a very serious impactful edge in carp fishing catch results if that difference has been designed to solve problems where the solution can provide really effective leverage; and thus provide improved results when compared to more standard (or previous) results.

After all that has been said to this point, I have to state that frankly millions and millions of carp are caught on baits which offer carp little or zero stimulatory nutritional value whatsoever. But with such baits you personally are the one leveraging these baits by using your own fishing skills, experience and level of talent. All of these really do matter, but with instant baits you are leveraging bait influences to a far lesser degree than it is possible to do so, plus you are at a far greater advantage if you happen to be a very good angler in the first place!.) With the majority of attractor baits, fish are opportunistic feeding in contrast to when using an established food bait where they will be seeking these out specifically.

The idea that carp are attuned enough to seek out one bait rather than another is best proven to yourself on a very much angler-pressured big fish water (especially a rich one,) where many lesser biologically nutritionally valuable baits will not perform very well at all! On such waters, if you can catch fish using small amounts of bait consistently - without being the most able or talented rod on the water, you can be sure it is the bait doing the work for you!

This brings us to the area of where so many carp anglers miss the wood for the trees. So many carp bait recipes seen on forums etc on the web and other places will work; but will they work on very pressured carp against even more potent naturally-stimulating baits? Below is just one of thousands of ways of cheating carp senses to a degree. You can make a homemade bait with ease that fools carp initially into treating your bait as if it has more rewards and respond to pick it up that it might truly have compared to the genuine article.

For instance, you can fish for a few weeks on a water introducing a genuinely outstanding commercial bait so fish get to recognise it effects actually within their bodies and begin to actually seek it out as a natural food source. Then you can start to cut the base mix you are making so it contains perhaps up to a 50 percent of bulking-out ingredients – so making the over-all cost of your bait cheaper. Examples of cheaper ingredients you can use to combine together to bulk up an already successfully established commercial base mix include yeast powders, crushed seeds and nuts meals, soya flour and halibut pellet powder, maize meal, certain liver powders, Belachan, Whole milk powders, Vitamealo, Lamlac and crushed dog biscuits, (very rich in carp-stimulating natural extracts, bacterial enzymes and taste enhancers.)

Even ordinary wheat flour is not out of the question as a bulking ingredient in many bait recipes; its endogenous peptides make it pretty habit-forming regardless of having a digestible protein content of less that 10 percent! (I’ve made many a homemade bait with wheat in various forms and had fish in the upper thirties and forties so obviously I’m confident in including it here.)

If you really want to cheap you have the old classic bait making method of grinding up pellets and adding eggs. For instance, you might make a bait based on ground carp pellets bound and boosted with added egg albumin and whey protein concentrate for example, plus the awesome Ccmoore Feedstim XP liquid and super pure betaine liquid for instance.

The quality of the flagship products of major bait companies (and many smaller ones too) has improved over the decades. The costs of buying your bait can be reduced in various ways without reducing your catch results and quite a few bait companies offer ingredients that will reduce you costs in baits mixes but actually give you an alternative and different edge nutritionally so attention to details about ingredients and additives is extremely valuable. One example is the de-fatted green lipped mussel extract of Ccmoore plus their newly introduced squid liver extract which is more potent than similar products I have used for years.

Often some of the first fish out of a water on a new bait are some of the wariest ones some of which will be the biggest ones. Actually some of the most outstanding bait flavours do have exceptional nutritionally stimulation and I really recommend these if you are using low biologically based homemade baits. All this talk about food has made me hungry! For more free articles and further information on money-saving effective bait-making  and formulating baits for big carp and giant catfish see further my unique electronic books on this subject plus much more!

By Tim Richardson

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