Yes, it is a fact, your homemade baits really can out-compete popular, expensive readymade baits! If the point of bait is to outsmart fishes' suspicions of fishing bait, why try and compete using baits that other anglers may well have blown to a degree already, when you can make your own baits and never have your baits blow – and at a fraction of the price of readymade baits?! Read on to make seriously competitive baits!

Actually, great baits do not blow as such; it just means that once hooked, or hooked a number of times on any particular bait, fish instincts and bait-related experiences make fish feed far more cautiously so become much harder to hook. Certainly, fish are very capable of totally rejecting baits outright if they have enough reason! For instance, I applied what I learnt from my many years of catching big catfish to designing carp baits, as very many commonalities exist in substance sensitivities and essential dietary needs, but both species can become very hard to hook on certain baits if hooked too much on them. In fact, catfish can easily avoid feeding on obvious baits such as squid and liver, if hooked previously on them, despite such baits having great nutritional value! If you doubt my own experiences of this, read about Kevin Maddocks and his similar problems with bait rejection and solutions to this challenge!

3 upper twenties hooked at the same time (retaining sacks were literally ruled-out) - this rare catch is a prime example of getting everything right!

The anglers who insist that nutritionally valuable baits just keep on working year on year, with the same successful results, are misleading because they usually fail to factor in certain variables. These include that although fish may continue to consume such baits, these baits certainly do have a reduced capacity for encouraging maximised, confident feeding due to fish recognising aspects of these baits and fearing them due to this recognition. Why do you think bait companies keep bringing out altered, new improved versions of their baits? It is not purely to keep you interested by offering new products! The fact is that unfamiliar baits, whether nutritional or not, tend to achieve more success before the fish have had a chance to respond to them with a heightened degree of suspicion and fear.

Of course individual fish will simply respond more warily to familiar and previously dangerous bait recipes and forms that they recognise. Fish are not clones but are individuals with varied genetics, slightly differing essential requirements over time and different taste and smell preferences etc that may be true to an individual and stay constant or change over time for many reasons. The way fish deal with our hook baits and free baits is very interesting to watch, as you will soon realise that certain fish are leaders and some are followers, some are shoal fish and some are loners, some are used a guinea pigs to test baits for others, and some copy the warier older feeding fish, or they might copy the younger, more adaptable, wary feeding fish.

All this is like individual humans. Sure, basically, we look alike but our genetics differ on a much more cutting edge level between individuals tremendously, and such enormous and subtle genetic differences are only being uncovered today. For instance, if you want the highest chances of producing offspring that are world class athletes, footballers or musical performers, if both parents have this kind of genetic heritage you will have the highest possibility of offspring inheriting and manifesting such specific traits.

But the same goes for people with incredible eyesight, people with elevated senses of taste, people with extremely high metabolism or incredibly efficient naturally low heart beat rates, people with super-strong immune systems, people who simply grow far faster and bigger, more muscular, taller or shorter or carrying more stored fat than those of the same age. Some people have extremely high levels of intelligence. Intelligence can be measured in many ways that those stupid IQ tests that are so limiting and stereotypical. In fact tests most favour individuals best at doing tests!

This is like carp – some are best at detecting and dealing with hook baits, while other fish may be very poor at these tasks. But before you go putting down so-called mug fish, remember that individual fish may simply have an elevated genetic requirement for a particular amino acid or cannot digest their food that well due to a genetic imbalance or deficiency in certain cellular proteins or whatever. After all, people with problems digesting food take betaine HCL to help them digest food, and body-builders take additional amino acids to put on muscle and to help their bodies recover from physiological stress etc.

Physical sensitivity, chemical sensitivities, spatial awareness and ability to communicate with others are intelligences that can be very easily applied to fish in terms of their success at survival and are just a few of the factors that can make catching fish harder, or that can be exploited and maximised deliberately to make catching fish easier. Fish are like dogs and humans because they can be conditioned in many ways. Did you know that dogs prefer sweetened foods and one of the more exotic sweet ingredients in some dog foods are pecan nuts? I hope this makes you think! Carp are the same in their attraction to sweet food items and the reasons for this are both obvious and extremely complex.

However, glucose is a very basic energy source in fish and humans when in the bloodstream. How many anglers utilise liquid glucose in their baits to give fish a sudden energy spike?

Ultimately nutritional baits and low value attractor baits are about stimulating feeding which infers the use of energy. A bait may produce a spurt in energy when it is eaten, or even before it is eaten because fish can assimilate substances in water that can have this effect well before a bait is even mouthed or tasted with the lips and barbels close up.

Human adipose fat of the type made famous by the modern obesity epidemic (which in the bulk of cases is an excess of fat) is composed of 87 percent lipids. I hate catching fat carp because they are obviously not particularly healthy and will have a sluggish metabolism compared to leaner fish of far greater age and size! The use of high oil pellets is a crime robbing many fish of health and potential lifespan. All those fish feed on high oil baits through the warmer months are hardly likely to be much easier to catch through colder months having built up deposits of fat that dispose with the need to feed for long periods.

How many anglers have noticed how bad winter and spring carp fishing has been in the years since mass use of high oil pellets have been used in incredible volumes by ever more multitudes of anglers entering carp fishing?! The effects of these has far exceeded the impacts of milder winters that provided higher natural food levels – natural foods are predominantly easy to digest compared to most modern fishing baits.

Salmonids have quite a lot higher essential need for lipids for energy compared to carp so high oil salmon and trout pellets are far from ideal. Catfish have a much higher metabolic rate compared to carp per 5 degree in temperature increase so high lipid levels in catfish baits are not such a problem and obviously very beneficial in high temperatures in summer. Fatty baits for catfish have obviously proved their value but do notice that such baits tend to be rich in proteins the digestion and processing of which burns up high amounts of energy!

Anyway, protein-rich foods and foods and substances of many diverse types that stimulate the burning of stored fat form energy are extremely important in human slimming and such system-stimulating substances link to certain impacts of some very well known carp baits including certain flavours! I always recommend using liquid lecithins in regards to use of fats to improve bait digestion and to very much boost overall bait performance. The high PC version from Carpfishingpellets (online) as well as from CW Baits is extremely well proven in extensive testing even in the coldest of recent winters!

Consider using wheatgerm and maize protein all year round too in regards to energy-efficiency! (I hope you get this hint!) I have used linseeds for a long time in my baits. What lipid-rich seeds can you think of as alternatives to Niger seed and hemp? What alternatives can you think of instead of using all too familiar aniseed and black pepper essential oils for instance?! Again consider the point you are aiming to out-fish competing baits and utilise different bait substances and ingredients etc and achieve far more confident feeding!

These kinds of stimulatory secrets can be exploited by literally any angler when you have gained a better understanding of various aspects of baits. Plus this knowledge will also keep you naturally leaner, fitter, healthier, more energetic, more attractive and most likely live longer too – and will enable your homemade boilie, pellets, paste and ground baits of many diverse designs to very successfully out-fish popular expensive readymade baits!

By Tim Richardson. 

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