Flat bottom boats are quite known among numerous various anglers. Such boats are usually littleer than other types of boats and similarly feature an open design. For the most part, flat bottom boats are built to be employd on littleer bodies of water that are calm, such as small lakes, slow rivers and ponds. Keep in mind that flat bottom boats do not predictably hold up well on rough water or water that is choppy. These boats shouldn’t be employd in such waters because they generally aren’t very stable.

One well known type of flat bottom boat is known as a punt. These types of flat bottom boats are commonly employd for moving cargo or individuals along water. They have truly been employd for many years around the world. Users will find that they are easy to maneuver.

Flat bottom boats may or may not have a motor onboard. Some flat bottom boats are meant to be maneuvered using paddles or oars. When shopping for such flat bottom boats it is optimal to bear in mind that such boats will by and large not move very fast. Obviously, if you intend to rerigid your boating to small bodies of water then it may not be that important to you to move speedyly through the water.

Flat bottom boats also are commonly lighter and simpler to transport than numerous other types of boats. This can be a merit if you do not have a large vehicle for transporting the boat. Even if all you have is a little vehicle, you may usually transport a flat bottom boat quite effortlessly.

You may select to shop for novel flat bottom boats or utilised flat bottom boats. New boats will furnish you with the assurance that the boat is in good order and no concerns regarding repairs for quite some time. The trade-off is that you will pay a extremeer cost. Buying a used boat will permit you the benefit of a purchase for a lower price, but you will need to accept the fact that you may be facing more repairs and more maintenance issues than you would if you bought a new boat. If you do decide to purchase a utilised boat then it may be a good idea to make certain that you set aside a remarkable fund to cover the repair and maintenance issues that you may face in the future.

When you are in the market place for a used boat you may wonder where the best place would be to obtain a nice utilized boat. In many examples, the optimal place to search for a used boat would be the boat classified advertisements section of your newspaper. Oftentimes when people no longer want their boat or prefer to upgrade to a more novel or enormous boat they will number their current boat in the boat classifieds. This can show to be a great chance if you are in the market to buy a secondhand boat.

When purchasing a secondhand boat from the boat classified ads there are various things that you need to keep in mind in order to make sure that you purchase the best boat for your needs. To start with, ensure that you consider more than just the price. If you are on a budget then it can be quite alluring to simply look for a boat in the boat classified ads according to the price. A reduced cost is not the only factor that should be considered when purchasing a secondhand boat. While there are many secondhand boats that are in great condition, if you desire to make sure that you keep problems to a minimum later on, you need to consider the real condition of the boat.

Call the number that is listed in the boat classifieds and inquire about the boat that is listed for sale. Foremost, enquire about the age of the boat and the sort of boat that is for sale. You should also enquire about the type of water that the boat was used in previously. Additionally, inquire how often the boat has been secondhand. Bear in mind that the age of the boat and how much it has been utilized is not the same thing. Even a comparatively original boat could have seen quite a bit of use.

When thinking of buying a boat from the boat classifieds you also want to ask the marketer what type of upkeep and remedies the boat has had. If feasible, ask the seller to present you the maintenance log for the boat.

Lastly, remember that you should never buy a boat sight unseen from the boat classified advertisements. You should always make a point to scrutinize the boat in person and when possible you should have a mechanic inspect the boat to insure that it is in right condition.

You pay a fortune on bait hoping to catch lots of big fish and yet the average carp angler is just that – average, because he catches no more fish than the rest. This literally means something he is doing or thinking approach just is not working. Most anglers simply throw money in the bin in bait costs etc because they have missed something so very vital to success!

Big catfish and carp fishermen use many baits as ground baits, including maize, sweetcorn, hemp, boilies, pellets, and commercially made ground baits etc,) and these can cost you a fortune through each year! The vast percentage of this is actually wasted due to it not transferring into fish caught. This means excessive amounts of money are wasted because obviously something is being missed in the thinking and angling approach being used by the average angler!

If you are consistently feeding your swim each time you fish and this does not consistently equate to better catches, then you are simply feeding the fish, going through the motions and expecting miracles to occur as doing the same thing repeatedly and keeping expecting results to be different is simply a definition of insanity!

This very certainly applies to angler-pressured big catfish too, whose bait preferences can definitely alter in response to angling pressures and to previous captures on a bait. So the big trick is trying to keep ahead of the fish and not wasting your hard-earned money every week on bait that does not convert into fish; to achieve very satisfactory fish captures. For most anglers just going fishing costs money because it is missed money-earning time, and this cost is quite apart from travelling costs, fishing permits, and wasted free bait!

So converting your bait money at the very least into better catches, is perhaps even more of an issue, especially in tough times. Of course every fishery is different and these days there are many waters that are over-stocked to the degree that it appears everyone catches fish successfully. But who is to know just how much better your individual catches can really be until you truly get innovative and prove it to yourself?

It is a very common phenomenon for the more wary fish to simply not feed upon fresh baits introduced by anglers upon first arriving at a fishery at all. This in effect means that the first 3 or more days and nights fishing can be mostly a waste of time. The fish just hang back while the baits become leached of flavours etc, and the fish become more confident on feeding on such baits because they have associated leached bait with safe feeding.

On very pressured fisheries, Mr average angler will bait-up upon arriving and perhaps fish for 48 hours, maybe blank, and then be followed into the swim by another angler who simply does the same things with the same thinking approaches, and gets the same poor catches as a result! This is a pattern that is prevalent on so many carp waters today and the conveyor-belt like manifestation of the straight-jacketed thinking the majority of average anglers seem satisfied with. Yes, occasionally the fortunate angler who happens to be in a previously such pre-baited swim with get good results and hence the appearance of so many so-called popular swims! But all this incessant baiting on many water in certain swims can backfire as fish respond to captures, and in such a case all the bait can go off and kill the swim (as Mr average carp angler arrives and baits up again , adding to the problem!)

When your fishing activities become habitual and a kind of automatic process, this often means you have by-passed your thinking processes and are not focussing upon the constantly changing challenges that changing variables and fish behaviours and impacts of other anglers seriously have, and your results will severely reflect this! After all, you might well act differently every day in order to fool predators just to see the next day and carp have this instinct to survive which they use all the time which means what we do or think that worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work today…

For instance, it was very lucky of me to catch a carp of 38 pounds; an amazing very pale white mirror (not koi carp) from one very pressured UK water. In over 7 years it was seen but not caught, but it was the combination of new bait, rig, baiting method and frequency and other things combined that produced this fish, (that all those anglers did not do previously,) and this unique combination produced dozens more good fish following this capture.

Using new attractant substances and feeding triggers combinations in a new baiting design, teamed with innovative bait application methods which rarely if ever have been exploited on your water before, will obviously give you great results compared to just going through the motions again and again! With a little thought you can always find something in your approach that is new and different on any water, that reaps you far greater catch results than otherwise would be achieved. This can mean literally anything!

By fully considering the implications of your fishing activities on fish, in terms of negative and positive impacts on their senses, in relation to the progressive conditioning by angling activities and baits and natural senses and behavioural sensitivities, you can unlock excellent results. The questions and answers may be common to all waters, but there will always be things unique in your fishing of any particular water that produces better results; being refined specifically for that exact moment in time on that water. By leveraging your more exacting angling solutions at any moment in time on a water, you can know for sure that your bait costs will be leveraged to far greater effect and this avoids so much of that bait wastage that simply going through the motions produces!

To leverage the true power of your baits does take a little extra effort on your part but that effort is never wasted! But I hope this article makes you think a little more of further possibilities the next time you bait-up, as usual… This bait secrets ebooks author has many more fishing secrets insights and bait edges available and just one could impact very significantly on your big fish catches!

By Tim Richardson.

You can make carp baits as easy and simple or as complex as you want but one thing is certain and that is, for best results you need to make sure your baits are as unlikely to arouse as little suspicion in fish as possible. To do this you need to leverage the top rule with fishing bait; that of making your bait unique and different! A new different bait has the best potential to tempt big wary carp because even where a so-called food bait or nutritional biological value bait is established, once fish get hooked on it, then fish feeding behaviour on it can alter dramatically!

Improving your baits competitive edges is all about adapting their ingredients or adding extra ones soaked in, or treating the bait with a new process so it smells and tastes different to its previous version. Other carp can senses come into the equation and be exploited in regards to texture, colour, density, shape, buoyancy, firmness, solubility and permeability etc. However you do it, changing a bait in even one small way can sustain your results on it or even totally transform your results far more positively!

To prolong the life of a readymade bait or produce a new homemade one, you have an amazingly diverse fishing bait industry offering decades of experience and field tested products proven to catch fish. So finding new products and combinations of them you can trust is easy. But there are literally thousands of products which can be exploited which are not usually used by carp anglers and theses often have potent competitive edges over the most popular proprietary ones on pressured carp waters.

There is much said about flavors. This probably because they have such vivid impacts upon our senses as most are mainly based upon strongly volatile solvent substances and many taste and smell like foods we recognise; like pineapple, cranberry, banana and strawberry. Changing flavors can easily produce a new bait and renewed results, but synthetic and solvent based flavors are merely a tiny tip of the real flavors iceberg available to us to exploit. Flavor components can do very various things to fish and the water surrounding our baits to induce bites.

Your bait will have a smell and taste even though it may have had no flavors added. Every ingredient you put into a bait has some impact upon it and bait ingredients do not work in isolation but together synergistically and this is how they affect fish senses and fish digestion too. Fish are totally aware of all this and can even detect the components of flavors in their instinctive search for potential food that might provide essential dietary requirements or simply an energy requirement; energy is essential for all life. Intrinsic flavors and smells exist in baits long after our own human senses cannot detect them. Flavors will act differently in air compared to water and this is very significant for example in regards solubility, use through the seasons and rate of diffusion of attractors through the water to pull fish towards your bait.

Big carp can come from any bait from highly flavored ones to ones with zero added flavor including plastic and rubber baits and even artificial lures and live baits. Carp do go predatory at times and are programmed to detect exploit any potential suitable new food source. Various anglers argue the cases for using rubber and plastic baits and others recommend highly flavored instant attractor baits or balanced profile biologically beneficial food baits.

When you realise that carp will pick up anything between its lips to more fully sample and identify its potential a food you can understand why practically any bait will hook a carp at least once or never again. This means that fake baits are not the super baits many seem to think as over time these bait forms too will lose their initial advantages and edges through over-use and repeated capture conditioning of fish. Just by handling them you are tainting them with substances carp can detect and associate with danger if hooked on them and encountering them in the future.

So what is the translation of making a bait different in order to achieve perpetual edges over your fish especially in regards to bigger fish? The fact is there are thousands of substances to exploit and just one can make all the difference and transform your results. Put as simply as possible, fish and humans share numerous very vital processes which all relate to energy and its efficient use.

A great additive for big fish baits is betaine. This is a familiar substance for many carp anglers. But why is it special? So many substances trigger feeding or at least induce exploratory feeding behaviours. Well betaine occurs naturally in human diet and fish diet in natural foods. So it is no surprise that it is used for many vital functions roles and processes in our bodies and though not an a carp essential amino acid it is very important and vital to fish. In fact, so vital that its feeding triggering effects top that of the amino acid alanine which is a known feeding stimulant for very many fish species. The fish olfactory bulb receptor cells are especially stimulated by betaine. It was originally named betaine because it was first identified in the root crops beta vulgaris or beetroot, from which the very first sugar beets were derived from. (Sugars and sweeteners are potent carp feeding triggers.)

In fact I focus on betaine because it has an even more intense feeding stimulation impact on carp sensory systems than the fellow feeding stimulator, the amino acid alanine. Most anglers already appreciate the impacts of amino acids upon fish feeding but do not relate this intense feeding response to hardly any other substances. But just in the same way that betaine and amino acids are significant growth and health and balance promoters etc, thousands of other substances have very significant bioactive effects on fish we can exploit in baits for big fish.

From the active enzymes in hemp seeds, peptides in milk powder ingredients, theobromine and polyphenols in coco, sugars, flavonoids, ketones, acids, esters and enzymes etc in real fruit juices, even salts and acids in mature cheese; these are all potent feeding triggers and attractors. Next time look at the ingredients list of a readymade meal and count how many stimulate you and how and might be fish attractors and feeding triggers to exploit in your baits. These ingredients are often included for powerful bioactive and habit-forming reasons to get you and your body to crave for more… Whether your first priority is the fishing, hunting camping or just pursuing hobbies outdoors for recreation and sport, your bait will make all the difference; so the more you know the better your results will be for life!

By Tim Richardson.

Saving yourself the cost of expensive bait is one of the most important factors in fishing success for many carp fishermen. It can take quantities of expensive readymade bait to achieve great results and if you have a way of making this very quickly and very cheaply then you can save yourself untold fortunes and catch as many if not more fish than on readymade baits. Once you have a few basic bits of information on making baits you are free to create unique economical baits for big fish for years to come and save yourself a real fortune!

Carp live in an aquatic world where most of the food they eat is based on proteins which can also contain important essential oils which also provide extremely efficient energy and do not predominantly eat carbohydrates as with so many races of humans. Carp have evolved to extract the most energy as possible from the foods available; and this means from proteins especially. Making fishing baits which contain protein ingredients is so important and is in line with carp natural dietary (and naturally stimulatory bait requirements.)

Protein ingredients are used very much in carp bait making because they contain stimulating and dietary essential amino acids. Of the 10 or so carp essential amino acids some of the most important ones are: Lysine, methionine, valine, leucine, phenylalanine, histidine, isoleucine, threonine, arginine and tryptophan. Using protein ingredients in your carp baits can very much determine if fish actually eat your bait or not!

Both carp and humans have become physically adapted to get the most energy efficiently from our foods which are available to us. This can be exploited by actually using carp senses normally naturally used to detect food substances, in order to induce fish to feed on our baits. Apart from proteins and amino acids there are thousands of other substances to induce feeding behaviour from carp of various levels of intensity or activity, so you will never be short of an idea to make your baits unique to keep ahead!

Amino acid needs of carp are important because we can exploit them even in very simple baits to induce better feeding on baits and more bites. But these essential are not absolutely necessary to catch fish on homemade baits; far from it in fact and you can very often catch fish on competitive pressured fisheries on simple carbohydrate wheat and soya type baits which are extremely economical to make! To keep ahead of the fish you might simply just change certain aspects of the bait like attractors such as flavours or even treacles, honey, molasses, cordial syrups, or liqueurs etc.

In the UK many fishermen have the attitude that carp baits not made from very expensive protein ingredients are crap baits and catch few big fish, but the truth is that you can catch as many fish on carbohydrate based baits if you know what you are doing and have enough experience of other ingredients and how to fish such baits well and save yourself a fortune, which is what I have done successfully for decades. You just keep adjusting levels and types of stimulatory and attractive substances to create new baits regularly, so keeping ahead of the fish; and many big fish often fall to new unfamiliar baits with good reason…

So many carp fisheries are over-stocked that the fish need to eat your bait and treat it as natural food. As many carp anglers know well, possibly the greatest edge is to be different and so you can fish with confidence against any well-used readymade commercial bait knowing your unique bait has a great edge of being different and unique. This is one great motivator for me to make my own extremely economical and productive homemade carp baits rather than spend 10 pounds or 20 Dollars on a bag of readymade bait that others are already using!

You might wish to use things like bird foods which can be used both as binders and cheap but nutritional ingredients and just add eggs for example to help bind and can boost your bait protein and nutrition considerably despite carp digestion limiting effects in low temperatures especially. Bait making does not need to be rocket science and the simplest and cheapest of bait recipes catch big fish regularly for decades if fished well. Although carp love proteins for there amino acids particularly, stimulatory and attractive substances are so varied that you will never be short of a new effective homemade bait or alternative potent and unique readymade bait dip; all you need is quality know-how…

By Tim Richardson.

Big carp and catfish have been caught on very cheap but extremely effective sausage meat baits for decades. Homemade sausage meat baits and ground baits are enormously cheaper than many shop-bought baits and expensive popular luncheon meat and Pepperoni products. Let’s see how to make yourself some big fish baits that really save you money and catch big fish!

Using sausage meat is rather more ethical than basing your baits on very valuable marine resources, but you can use it to bulk-up certain fish or shellfish bait mixes to cut costs and create different nutritional profiles, tastes effects etc. you can easily get sausage meat fresh or frozen fresh and fresh is best although catfish are also renowned for loving baits just souring, but I would prefer to use this effect with blood based baits for instance and not pork. Often the biggest fish in your water will take a new safe bait pretty quickly and certainly sausage meat based baits are not trendy so can really give you many competitive edges!

Sausage meat is very simple and easy to use and you can either mince it up or use the minced product. The nutritional value of pork sausage meat is very stimulatory to both carp and catfish and has a fair proportion of those important fish stimulators; amino acids and oils. Pork sausage meat is often made with bread crumbs and it is very simple to make a bait by simply mixing it with eggs and very cheap wheat flour for example, although other more nutritional binding flours and meals are very numerous, to help bind bait into a dough.

Making one of the cheapest protein based homemade baits is simple, fast and very easy to do:

For example, using half a pound of minced sausage meat, mix it in a bowl with about 3 to 4 large hens eggs and around 2 table spoons of ordinary cheap wheat flour (or more if required) and kneed this into a stiff pliable dough. This can be used as fishing bait immediately as paste, or you can bag it up in bags with a tie to make the bag air tight and store in the fridge or freeze it for use next session. This bait is pretty much instant on most carp and catfish waters even though various meat brands and grades may very results and although very basic and simple will produce lots of fish.

Putting regular batches of baits in swims is a very good advantage to get fish to really respond to your new bait. (You do not have to do this using sausage meat as it is mostly instant acting; but why miss a good trick!?) If you put out golf ball size baits a few times into swims before using it, then fish will eat this safe bait and it will definitely improve your results come the time of using when you do fish with it!

The effect of pre-baiting is that the fish will be far more prepared to eat your bait with even more enthusiasm when you start actually fishing; so hold onto your rod! Sausage meat in this form makes fantastic ground baits too. Fishing paste balls has always been extremely effective, but these days you might prefer to make your baits more resilient to smaller fish (by par-boiling,) so they are still intact when the bigger fish arrive; but add some dough to your bait or hook or PVA bag anyway too!

As most commercial rolled baits have uniform shapes, your homemade baits in odd shapes have the advantage over more wary fish by disrupting their reference points! Boilies are just made by placing your dough baits only a handful at a time in half a pan of boiling water in a pan for a couple of minutes; this makes a resilient skin when they dry-off on conveniently placed absorbent towels or trays etc. keep your water boiling at all times by not adding too many baits at once and keep taking baits out after around 2 minutes or so.

Boiling baits for longer makes them harder as the eggs proteins coagulate more making your baits more resilient, but less attractive nutritionally. To make your baits more attractive the choices are many to improve results. Even adding garlic or sea salt or curry powders even at a teaspoon per egg will make a difference to performance.

As sausage meat is a fatty, oily bait, incorporating additives and ingredients and flavours to boost digestion and fish metabolism is a very good idea indeed. You might simply add spice and herb powders, any of a range of essential oils and extracts, or boost attraction with parmesan or blue cheese powder and added garlic granules or seaweed granules etc. Adding some liquid amino acids supplements is always useful in boosting nutritional attraction and this can be made at home very easily although it’s not for this piece. For colder weather you might add liquid lecithins and add oat or wheat bran which improve digestion, liver function and the vascular system of fish being rich in the feeding trigger, betaine!

You can add almost anything to enhance the stimulatory effects of your sausage baits but it helps if you really know what your ingredients do inside your fish and how they work together in baits to contribute the overall effects and improve catch results, and this knowledge really does save you a fortune and boost your confidence hugely! There are many ingredients etc you might add to stimulate fish which may be very expensive over a season, but going to the supermarket, health food shop, Asian store etc can provide really potent gems for a fraction of the cost when you know what to look for in terms of bioactive substances especially… Even adding liquidised liver with a few drops of spice or herb oleoresins and liquid lecithins can make drastic differences to results for relatively little cost and your baits will always be unique of course which a big edge anyway!

If you use proven fish feeding triggers and proven fish attractors with a nutritional or other physiological beneficial effect then they will pay their worth for sure. Even supermarket oil based citrus flavours can be very effective not least due to being unique and containing beneficial bioflavonoids, acids etc, but you can make your own homemade flavoured oils, flavours and nutritional glugs, dips etc for very little expense anyway. Homemade sausage meat baits do compete even with the latest enzyme-active commercial baits and catch big carp and catfish at a fraction of the cost of very many popular baits. Being different is one of the top edges in fishing even simply using the bait ideas here to adapt add an unusual bait paste moulded round your readymade bait is going to get you thinking about more productive possibilities in the future; and the more you know the more valuable cheaper edges you have!

By Tim Richardson.

Fishing bait from fishing shops can really make going carp fishing an expensive passion! Many anglers are now so conditioned to using readymade baits that they have never seriously considered the huge advantages of making very unique baits for themselves, but they will catch as many if not higher numbers of fish than commercial baits. The fact that homemade bait will cost you a fraction of the cost of readymade baits and over the days and weeks shocking savings can be achieved with no less fish (in fact quite the opposite!)

Every time I have used a homemade bait that is different to the popular baits on a water, big fish have appeared and this is one of those definite points about carp which you can exploit using homemade baits. Fish learn by association and will find your new baits much harder to resist than popular readymades that already have been exploited. This difference is often the factor that decides if you get a run of big fish, or just average results, or series of memorable personal best fish sessions or lots of blanks!

You just need to fish sensibly and thoughtfully as you would normally for any big wary fish in order to be consistently successful. There is such a special and unique thrill and great sense of satisfaction when you catch fish, especially big fish like carp, catfish, bass, tench or even pike on your own homemade bait. One crucially important point about homemade baits is that you have no chance of anyone ruining your own chances by also fishing using your bait.

The funny thing is, most carp anglers never stop to think and see that by using readymade baits they could be cutting their chances by well over half. This is because at any point in time you will be fishing against an unknown number of other anglers who may all be using the bait you are. Your readymade bait has no more chance of catching fish than the next guys. But if you know how to adapt them or make your own, you are putting your baits catching potential in a different league to Mr Average! With a different bait your chances can really skyrocket and it pays you back enormously many times over repeatedly for making minor effort with your bait!

Popular baits in many ways do have a shelf life in terms of longevity of effectiveness. Top bait manufacturers will tell you that even in a stock pond which has never been fished, when a new bait has been fished intensively by a number of anglers successfully, their results can slow right up even literally to the point of no more fish being caught on that bait. (This is no exaggeration, for example Gary Bayes of the international bait company Nashbaits told me of his experience of this!) Many baits exploit highly concentrated flavors in order to affect bait pH to stimulate fish. Others use the biological nutritional value approach and call their baits food baits for this reason.

You might have read about making homemade baits and had the impression it has to be difficult and time consuming despite being more economical by far than using commercial baits. However it is in reality so easy to make homemade baits that catch fish over forty pounds that a 12 year old can do it and that is the real truth. There is no obligation for you to make baits anything like resembling commercial baits, all smooth, round barrel shapes perfectly formed and so on. In fact to copy them would lose you many hidden advantages that are not lost making very different baits! You do not even have to roll baits into balls at all or even boil them to produce boilies and there are very easy ways to avoid any time consuming parts in making baits.

You do not have to make individual baits in round shapes. Why not roll out a bait paste made of eggs, liquid additives and dry powders made into a dough and simply cut this into little odd shaped pieces? You could pop these into a pan of boiling water for about a minute or so to make boilies.

Making homemade bait is as hard as finding a bowl a mixing spoon or knife, a few eggs and some flours or other dry ingredients. Many flours about the house will bind to form a bait, from semolina and soya to maize and corn flour, and dried rice flour. For example, crack 5 or 6 eggs into a bowl and whisk them adding any flavouring or liquids additives you might choose, like ketchup or a flavoring from the baking aisle of your local store. Take 8 ounces of semolina and the same of soya flour and slowly add to your eggs until a dough the feel of putty is made. It is very easy and quick and with practice you can do this at lightening speed!

You can use your dough as paste bait immediately or if you are making bait for later use, then form some into individual baits and air dry them or steam or boil them, dry them overnight on suitable paper or towels and bag and store them in polythene bags. Freezing seals in bait freshness which is very important. If you remember to write which ingredients and levels each bait was made with, then you will never forget how to make them again! Normally it takes 6 large hen eggs to produce about 2 pounds of finished bait dough to use, or produce paste or air dried baits, steamed or boiled baits etc. Some baits will break down faster or slower than other mixtures depending on the number of eggs you use; the more soluble the ingredients and the more of these used, the faster your bait will dissolve in water.

I understand value like anyone else so making homemade bait for 3 pounds as opposed to buying it for 12 pounds makes great economic sense. This is startling especially when you think of the saving on 10 or 20 kilograms of homemade baits compared to commercially produced readymade ones. The saving can be in the region of 80 or 90 pounds for just 10 kilograms of bait. You will have been using many kilograms in a season so figure your savings on homemade bait, it could easily total you not hundreds but thousands of pounds so easily saved!

If having a different bait can produce such a difference in results you may as well have the goal of being as innovative as possible with yours as you create new versions for those big fish you dream of catching. The spooky thing about new baits on a water is that they very often produce the biggest most sought after fish within a short space of fishing time because they are fresh and new. Now this is as great a motive as anyone needs to take up bait making and is the icing on the cake. You can use simple forms of bait mentioned here, but you will discover that with successful baits comes the excitement of making more creative ones, and bait making can be extremely exciting, even an integral addictive part of your fishing, as you thirst for more information!

By Tim Richardson.

When you use carp bait blind without knowing how it works you are using blind faith. In contrast, if you understood far more how and why key aspects of that bait induced bites and had the power to manipulate these potent effect far more then your catches will definitely improve. Read on to find out more…

Confidence in a bag, (or bottle) when it come to bait is one of great personal opinions for every angler, because the truth is everyone has different experiences even on the same baits, at different waters, and many anglers with put down other baits even though they have never even used them, which is a tad bit short-sighted perhaps. Confidence mostly comes from perceptions in fishing, and certainly not from first-hand experience. But it is first-hand personal experience that is the only thing you can truly trust as fact, but I do not mean by this that claims about commercial bait quality and effectiveness are not true.

Now you might wonder what all this confidence stuff has to do with actually knowing something useful about vital carp senses beyond appreciating that they like a bit of protein or a maybe have a flavour preference now and again. In terms of flavours, not all are the same! If I suggested that chilli powder can help your bait be detected from greater range by senses involving various specialised receptor cells and specialised canal pits along the lateral line (and in the actual skin of the fish,) this might be new to many.

It may be remembered that bait substances get diluted in water and many chemicals occur in air which are not the same compounds when released into water. What if I suggested that it was not necessarily the familiar smell of garlic we humans recognise in air that produces its effects on carp for its success? What about the significance of the fact that when in water, certain pungent garlic compounds given off in air, including that distinctive garlic smell are not produced?

Carp are turned-on by far more than a vanilla or strawberry flavour combination and in fact often these will provide no response at all as they are not true feeding triggers as such, but some bait substances compensate for this by affecting carp in far more profound ways internally! Science is hard right; well I did an easy test on carp baits today by eating wheat-free biscuits and a wheat free doughnut; all done in interests of science and in the best possible taste! Sometimes there are substances used in foods and baits which are naturally there or added deliberately which induce you brain create the sensation of pleasure so you enjoy them more…

On eating the wheat-free foods I did not want to keep eating them and certainly Homer Simpson would have a shock if his doughnuts were wheat-free as there is something internally potent missing in them! Beyond all the flavours, sweeteners, enhancers and other goodies already added to those biscuits and doughnut (I say doughnut as I could only eat one,) something vital was missing. That missing substance that in wheat for example causes the release of feel-good hormones in the wheat-free foods was gone, and I really missed it!

Just imagine eating a food for years without that feel-good feeling after each morsel; making you want another one, and then eating one which does have this effect. Which one would you choose?! I don?t think you would have much choice; your brain will decide for you, and that is one reason why over-weight comfort food eaters who binge on cakes, biscuits, chocolate and many other foods, regularly can?t help themselves.

Many foods are made with substances that further impact on the brain to eat you to eat it more because it means the producers make more money and you actually get into a habit of eating it, and finding foods without such habit-inducing chemicals can be quite a hard thing to do if you try to rid your diet, body and brain to become free from their influence! Think tiger nuts or peanuts, now these are not exactly the most packed nutritional foods on the planet, but even though hemp is a super food in its own right, it too has substances with brain influencing impacts and practical consideration these aspects of bait ingredients, flavours etc can really get you the edge over fish, and other competing baits. You can term it using habit-forming or addictive substances to manipulate fish behaviours or just call it good use of what a bait should really be – i.e. addictive! The bait secrets ebooks author offering this has much more to reveal to those wanting better baits and bigger catches but this will certainly help you!

Tim Richardson.

The best thing about making homemade baits is the control and incredible satisfaction they provide in terms of control over your costs and catches and actual ingredients and so on you might choose to exploit to best effect! Most anglers discuss baits in terms of their favourite flavours or brands with very little focus upon exactly how such baits really impact upon fish senses which is a great shame (this aspect is a massive advantage lost on the majority of average anglers!) So if you want to know more about the truth about the real power of homemade baits and need help in designing and making them fast ” just read on!

These days more and more carp anglers are getting into making their own baits and this is no surprise! The average carp bait sold for a price of around 6 pounds here in the UK is very easily out-fished by cheaper better-designed and far more potently stimulatory homemade baits and all formats of ground baits, stick, slop, method and other baits including particles and pellets (besides boilies.) Very frequently Ive personally out-fished much more expensive popular brands using my own homemade baits. As I and many others have proven over the last 30 plus years, anyone with the desire to find out more about bait-making, can take back control from all the bait companies and fish their own unique baits exceptionally successfully (and with this knowledge, experience and skill, can out-fish leading brands.)

Having banked twenty forty pound carp from UK lakes I realise many things have changed about carp fishing in the past 40 years and especially the size of carp now available, but it is very obvious you need to fish the waters with fish of the size you wish to catch ” I know anglers who have very few twenties under their belts because of the limited lakes they fish within a particular region of the country. Your fishing goals are very personal and weight of fish is very irrelevant in many aspects; your personal success can be measured in many ways beyond fish weights and any sponsored angler can sit full-time on any water until they catch all the fish in the lake (i.e. big deal!) It is best to measure your success by setting your own goals and exactly how you aim to achieve them and fulfilling those goals than by comparing just how many thirties or whatever you have caught in a year and catching them on your own homemade unique baits makes all the difference to and gives a far deeper meaning to catch results in my opinion!

Like most carp anglers, I do not have the luxury of any of the advantages of the full-time sponsored angler or retired builders for example with loads of money and time to sit on big fish waters and rave about what great anglers they are (big deal!)! I have to fish against bait and tackle-sponsored anglers wherever I fish just the same as most of my fellow anglers, but one thing I have is desire, focus and willingness to constantly learn and refine my thinking which is so vital in fishing. Being able to make an effective homemade carp bait is a very well proven leveller to those advantages others may have in terms of money, time, personal contacts and up to date fishing intelligence and so on.

Your carp bait making efforts are always far more valuable in terms of improving your long-term success than you could ever imagine; what you learn about the stimulatory impacts of ingredients and substances puts you light years ahead of average anglers who are merely dependant upon ready made baits to solve their problems! You might be worried that you will make mistakes while designing and making your very own secrets baits but in fact these mistakes are not what they seem and actually provide excellent solutions for potent crumbly ground baits, highly flavoured attractor pastes etc and well over 90 percent of all your homemade baits will catch carp against the best readymade baits (but at a fraction of the cost!) One of the biggest secrets of making and designing homemade baits is providing carp with enough addictive and naturally stimulating substances within your baits so they have every reason to pick them up when fished against competing baits ” and given the key knowledge (see my ebooks at Baitbigfish,) literally anyone can do this!

The average carp angler has been conditioned by appearances to associate carp baits with flavours; many are still on the basic level of asking other anglers what flavour they are using and this is a great shame as these anglers are missing out on tremendously better catches if they knew more! The real key to long-term success for average-skilled anglers is the use of nutritionally stimulating baits seriously packed with optimum levels of nutritional substances carp need in order to survive. Many versions of food style baits are being offered commercially by countless companies, but the large majority of these baits are in effect wasted by the fish due to being indigestible to varying degrees ” but make no mistake, they still catch carp on many carp waters.

Flavours and the leverage of high levels of concentrated flavours for instance in hook baits is another option and many more talented and better-skilled carp anglers catch loads of big carp using these if only on a single-hook bait fishing approach. The most famous flavours need no mention here, but suffice to say, you can easily over-dose almost any bait with these flavours for great results (at least in the very short-term) on a variety of waters. Flavours vary enormously in their level of bioactive potency and the degree to which they stimulate the combined and individual senses of carp ” certain chilli extracts for instance will potentiate reactions that actually involve a pleasure ” from pain response; but please note that every carp bait ingredient has something about it carp detect if only in a few parts per million!

In my opinion the best starting point in making homemade baits, is to get to really become familiar with many of the natural feeding triggers carp are most sensitive to, from monophosphates, amino acids, (and other amines) similes and analogues of natural substances etc; then seek out the very highest quality products available that contain these for bait use at a reasonable price. There are many hidden factors in sourcing ingredients, such as taste enhancers or squid extracts that have been cut with cheaper products and constant experimentation is the key to outstanding results; but this is the learning curve that literally everyone that makes new baits is on. It is very possible for the beginner to boost a simple homemade 50:50 soya and semolina boilie base mix by the addition of high levels of a additives or ingredients that will supply many potent feeding triggers; such as fermented shrimp powder, de-fatted green-lipped mussel extract, enzyme-treated liver powder, abalone powder, Ccmoore Feedstim XP powder etc; these will make all the difference, so do yourself a big favour and find out more ” and my unique bait secrets ebooks (at Baitbigfish) make very stimulating reading!

By Tim Richardson.

Many methods can be used to enhance your hook baits effects and productivity. The carp ability to learn is beyond doubt, otherwise they would simply be as easy to catch as they are when virgin fish which have never been fished for. One of the easiest ways to change your bait to get an extra edge over wary fish is to use a liquid bait soak consisting of flavours, oils or amino acids.

Oil rich dips and those rich in amino acids are outstanding and can come from simple homemade sources like tinned tuna oil mixed with liver pate and garlic salt for instance. Or maybe try shrimp paste with diluted fruit cordial juice and yeast extract; you do not need to spend a fortune on readymade dips or soaks etc. Don’t boil your hook baits; steam them instead to allow far more nutritional attraction and stimulation to release into the water instead of being sealed inside and largely wasted!

Coat your baits in bait dough or paste. This is this best way to fish a base mix paste because all the water soluble goodies get to work to the maximum effect on carp stimulus receptors. You might liquidise or just mash some tinned salmon, sardines, herring or mackerel and add wheat flour or ground-up dog mixers with some hemp or sesame seed oil for example; aim to be different!

Many readymade baits have a surface which does not maximise their fish attraction in the water and it is important to break their surfaces to achieve far more takes. By making a boilies or pellets surface more irregular you can improve attraction leakage from the centre of the bait and fool fish into thinking your bait is safe, having previously been tested by other fish chewing on it! Using sharp scissors, knife or baiting needle you can easily improve the catch potential and attraction of your baits!

Try coating your baits with a dough or paste. This does not have to correspond to the hook bait you use at all; it could be you use a red fish meal boilie coated with a yellow bird food paste mix. Or tiger nut coated in shrimp paste, or luncheon meat coated with aniseed flavoured ground bait based paste.

You might like to try using paste around buoyant baits like pop-ups. Your hook bait and paste covering do not need to be like each other to produce great catches; in fact far from it! The method of coating a pop-up bait with a very different dough is a huge edge and is very well recommended!

You can add cork granules and other very light or buoyant ingredients to make it float or hang in the water off the bottom or silt or weed for instance. Imagine the advantage of using a buoyant paste around a bottom bait or semi-buoyant bait and how frequently your fish will have had to deal with this! Using buoyant paste around bottom sinking hook baits can seriously save you blank sessions!

It is a commonly held angling myth that fish do not learn, but in truth very many species can be conditioned by angling activities, bait introduction etc and even koi carp can be trained to take baits from out of a keepers hands and be in a particular place in advance of feeding time! If you think carp do not learn just consider that over time when repeatedly hooked by anglers, they do not get easier to catch but harder! It’s just the same with hunting of other kinds. For this reason alone it is definitely in your best interests to find out as much as possible how to maximise the impact and effects of your hook baits and free baits because a trap is only as good as the bait!

By Tim Richardson.