Everyone wants to know what the best way to make incredibly effective baits is. There is lots of advice out there but to really focus on making baits that out-fish the best readymade baits is a skill that even bait making beginners can develop with the right advanced knowledge. Here are a few more revealing select expert tips on recipes and (and on beating readymade baits) to get you seriously catching far more fish!
The major mistake most anglers make when thinking about making their own unique homemade baits is this: they start out thinking about ingredients first! You might think this sounds strange. Why is it wrong to think about ingredients first when after all you are going to use ingredients to make your bait? The answer is that you immediately lose the maximum potential for your baits to be most successful! Think about fishing bait like this and you will be massively more successful; the problem provides the solution! Never think about ingredients first! Always think first about fish when making bait and you guarantee maximum most consistent success.
Now think about fish and how they operate internally and externally in context of their aquatic environment. In other words, deliberately exploit all that they use to avoid getting hooked in your unique, favour by exploiting these systems, sensitivities and behaviours. You achieve this by using the very specific leverage of carefully chosen bait substances chosen exactly due to their impacts you desire to have on fish internally and externally, and of course on water, the medium they will be detected within!
Most bait makers seem to over look that bait is best in solution, not in hard balls sitting on the bottom. In fact carp do not even spend the majority of their time on the bottom anyway. They travel off the bottom and exploit foods and temperature changes in an array of changing natural rhythms and changing conditions including those set by influence of sun and moon electromagnetic changes and so on that affect patterns in things like timings of natural hatches of mayflies and caddis flies, timings of most abundant blooming of bloodworms, timings of most abundant concentrations of zooplankton and algae in different water layers during night time and in certain current streams in a lake on certain days etc.
In this case you are pitting your wits against an ever evolving dynamically changing creature that is not static, and always adapting to new opportunities and threats in its environment, just as we humans are each and every day. You need to relate your bait design to the fish first. Sure fish constantly consume hard shelled crustacean and mollusks such as fresh water shrimp, a range of snails, mussels, and even crayfish in many waters today. It might not seem that much of a coincidence as this is totally logical, but when actually fishing you will get far more bites when fishing where fish feed naturally where their natural food is located.
I hope you can see the link here that if you fish on a bloodworm bed being actively harvested by the biggest fish in your lake then you are going to have far more chance of catching those fish compared to not fishing where the fish are most active! But you can miss out on a big part of the more hidden success formula here. Sure you catch fish when are fishing actually on fish, that much is obvious.
But in this case for instance you are on fishing on top of fish that are not only actively regularly feeding in a location, but are being conditioned through exposure to dissolved substances from the bloodworm and also from vibrations from bloodworm wriggling movements as they move and feed themselves.
Exposure to dissolved bloodworm excretions affects receptors in fish that influences their adaptation so that fish are even more sensitive to this form of food than usual. You can say that bloodworm have become far more palatable to carp. Palatability is a very major part of bait design as it not only means fish will feed and consume your baits, but when optimised for palatability then fish will be induced to feed repeatedly and give you maximum chances of hooking fish!
Being able to become sensitized to a food item is a natural adaptation fish have evolved. Obviously this makes detecting bloodworm and other foods much easier and far more energy efficient. Consider that carp can spend lots of time with their heads buried in black thick silk seeking out bloodworm in summer time. Being far more sensitized to the bloodworm secretions etc makes carp far more able to find extremely nutritious food at least energy cost. If a carp did not sensitise more to a particular food item it could well waste more energy than it would actually derive from finding and digesting it and this is certainly not a situation that will promote chances of survival!
The fact that human receptors sensitise to refined sugar because such sugar satisfies the bodys requirement for instance energy is something to bear in mind. It is not that sugar even stands out as so many substances are addictive in so-called foods today. If I suggest sugar is addictive you would maybe not believe me until I say that the food industry uses it as much as possible because it is addictive and alters the sensitivity of your receptors - even passing these changes onto to your grandchildren through your genes!
Fishing on a prime bloodworm bed means you are exploiting a naturally stimulating aquatic situation that is packed with concentrated foods and stimuli that hold fish and make them feed repeatedly. But the vital key here is that you are exploiting naturally heightened fish sensitivities and natural behaviour patterns and modes of feeding that those related food substances induce.
Among many things we can use baits to best do in order to catch fish is to actually replicate the influence of natural foods upon carp senses. It is all about seeing the bigger picture. We can sensitise fish to our own unique baits in certain ways that make them super potent, but this is simply one angle of attack and this is why it is so easy to out-fish any established readymade bait using your own optimised homemade baits. I mention optimised because heated baits of any form are not optimised. I can make homemade baits without any heating that last as long as I design those to last, from 3 hours to over 20 hours immersion.
I want my baits to be in solution not sitting as hard objects on the bottom. If my baits are hard then they soften but retain a flexible practicable matrix which is constantly open and releasing soluble bait materials. This mean that after 20 hours or even 3 hours if designed so, my hook baits will be smaller upon reeling in - and that is totally OK! Of course my free baits can be designed to break down in whatever time span to become sediment and release the maximum levels of soluble substances. Bait is working best actively breaking down. The most under-optimised baits just sit for hours as whole baits leaching a tiny fraction of components outwards.
Boiled or other heat-coagulated baits are very under-optimised baits indeed! They are a limited compromise to practicality and expectations of the masses who mistakenly think intact baits need to be some kind of conventional solid object attached to a hook - that is all! Think out of the box. Think about natural food items and find softness totally dominates even within crushable shells and carapaces!
So many anglers have a warped group conditioned mindset that makes them think that the ideal carp bait is a round ball or a soft or hard pellet sitting on the bottom or wafting in the water. But in fact the best bait is one that is actually actively dissolving and becoming solution. This dissolving produces the highest maximised concentrations of stimuli in the water that maintain fish physiology in excited states for repeated feeding and making them most vulnerable to being hooked on hook baits!
So think about the fact that carp habitually check out areas of their water for food opportunities and when food is in enough abundance to make feeding on it viable in terms of basic energy needs versus energy costs they will feed most enthusiastically. Ground baits and spod mixes are a reasonable line of attack, and of course using particle baits, crushed particles and crushed boilies and crushed pellets and tiny pellets etc are all part of the way towards keeping fish in a place and feeding. However the point is that you want fish constantly excited, but not fed!
Far too many anglers think baits need to be food, (as in to feed them,) but NO! Exploit sensitivities to substances found in their natural foods sure, but the primary purpose of bait is to stimulate feeding to maximum influence over fish behaviours in order to hook fish most efficiently! If you want to feed fish go start a fish farm and grow fish for profit and maximum weight gains! The 2 concepts of stimulating fish to maximum effect in order to hook them, and making fish food that is best digested for maximum biological conversion into fish, are totally different! I want to catch fish best - not feed them!
You have more chance of catching a carp fishing over 100 baits than 20,000. We used very high protein milk protein baits in low volumes during the seventies and eighties for one reason because they were effective like that, but also you simply did not need large volumes to induce great feeding especially when exploiting their soluble characteristics! It was only when fish meal baits became popularised so much and used as big beds of baits that so many anglers jumped onto the more is more mindset!
In fact the little and often approach is most usually the best way as any leading match man will advise, and the regular spodding of very very soluble bait for example is a good way though nothing new. This was a better method of bait delivery than using catapults at any range, and the Gardener bait rocket for example has been around for decades and I really enjoyed its benefits fishing over crushed extremely open granular bird food and pig food based type homemade baits in the eighties.
You want fish to be as excited and as stimulated as possible but not fed, so they will have most reason to try your hook baits multiple times. I say this as fish can be incredibly sensitive to bait density compared to water, among many other characteristics, and of course it is no surprise the most carefully balanced rig and bait can be beaten by very wary carp time and time again. However, when carp are stimulated to the degree that caution is overcome, well you see my point. This is for me the entire point of using fishing baits and designing baits optimised to actually achieve this situation. No whole baits do this satisfactorily and certainly no whole machine-formed readymade boilies can achieve this particularly if they last any longer than 3 hours without actively dissolving.
Of course anglers want to know that their baits are intact and still on when they reel in after perhaps a night of fishing where fish have been naturally feeding well. But how many times do anglers reel in after such a night, using readymade baits, not having had much success? Frankly it amazes me how many anglers are still in the mindset of using whole baits as free baits when it is so massively obvious that fish have had thousands of hours of practice avoiding that bait format and permutations of rigs utilizing that approach.
Most ideally you need to be making homemade baits that are nothing like any readymade popular baits in any way that fish can negatively associate with at all!
You can make then massively more stimulating by not only increasing levels of the most stimulating soluble substances within them, but totally changing the bait format entirely. I will not go into that here, but all I can say is that if you do this, then anglers fishing with readymade baits next to you will be scratching their heads wondering what on earth you are doing that is getting results when they are struggling to get bites - because you can make baits that sensitise fish to your homemade bait, which means other competing baits are noticed much less! This is providing that you do things to them that optimise them for solubility and diffusion.
Think about the most used bait format and avoid it at all costs (i.e. smooth surfaced rounded, pellet or barrel shaped whole hard baits.) Avoid the word boilies and transform your thinking into one of think fish first (and not bait or recipes or bait ingredients first!)
When all the lazy anglers with limited mindsets say to me give me a recipe I just laugh because they have missed what really matters by thousands of miles!
When you think about the relative density of natural food items carp seek out you will notice how much water content is involved and how much soluble substances these foods contain. This thought is a very revealing one I assure you! Do not aim to replicate a snail by making hard baits that can be made by machine. Aim instead to maximise the levels of natural stimuli in baits that are not hard but instead are resilient but soft, maybe even spiky and sharp not smooth, flexible, and even bend and give to pressure from lips of cautiously investigating carp. OK, There is so much more to all this but I will keep this short!
By erasing the word and meaning of the word boilie or even hard or solid pellet out of your fishing mindset, and replacing it with thoughts about how natural food is packed with concentrations of substances carp have evolved to be most sensitive to, then you can make baits than will be natural, move most naturally, not resemble commercial baits, and will out-fish readymade baits with ease! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!
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