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The best baits are all about gaining the bigger picture and understanding what works best and knowing why this is, so you can maximise this knowledge to maximum effect every time you go fishing, and exploit it at every opportunity. You can even create your very own amazing big fish catching opportunities to keep ahead of the crowd. So read on now for details for beginners and more seasoned bait makers alike. These top tips, and practical insights born of hard experiences will make a genuinely big difference to your catches!
Make your boilies without using eggs and use other forms of protein-rich ingredients and additives that do not seal baits so much that they are massively reduced in their potential effectiveness and truly work from the centre outwards!
Make your boilies without boiling them and steam them fast instead. For example only steam them for just 20 seconds. Or alternatively you can design your boilies so they are resilient baits, but used and applied with the absolute minimum of heating!
Make your boilies with no heating whatsoever so they last up to 20 hours or more intact, without being sealed by any heating coagulation of protein-rich ingredients and additives etc! Although these baits might appear as pastes, they will last like boilies and this is a key skill area that I have developed and value hugely in my own homemade bait-making and fishing approaches!
Make your baits with different and unique materials to those that your fish are used to! (In part note that this means avoid simply copying your celebrity heroes from the magazines and actually thinking for yourself more and more so you come to regard them as no better than anyone else!)
Use bait materials that offer different nutrition and bioactive factors to what fish are offered by the majority of anglers on your water.
If there is a currently dominant boilie on your water think about the reason that this is so! Consider the fact that essential nutritional requirements and bait taste specifics and very many bioactive and other factors in homemade baits of your own design can be harnessed in your own unique baits to out-fish the masses on the popular commercial baits; buck the trend and be a trend-setter for a change and be different!
Make sure your baits are unique in the way that fish experience them in multiple ways through all their sensory systems and more familiar and more obvious fish senses. Homemade baits can easily out-fish popular readymade baits just due to being unique and different when designed with thought.
Try making homemade baits that have unusual surface textures and internal textures that readymade baits rolled and pressed by machine cannot produce!
Make unusual oddly-shaped baits that commercial bait machines cannot produce!
Source additives, enhancers, extracts, ingredients, liquids and so on that you know will never have been experienced by your fish ever before. This is far easier than you might think if you just give it a go!
Try making your boilies and pellets of multiple different sizes.
Try making your baits different colours and shades!
Try combining mixing 2 bait recipes in dough form together just prior to forming your baits to break up the outline and shape of your baits visually.
Try making baits that do not have common colouration, such as black or green or grey or blue, instead of the brown, red, pink, orange, yellow and white and even purple colours and shades etc that wary fish are so used to avoiding these days!
Make your baits using multiple dyes and then mix them so that you combine them together and form multi coloured baits. You can easily do the same with homemade baits for flavours, different sweeteners and special extracts and protein-rich substances and protein liquids and so on, so that for example a third of each of your baits has a different flavour or even nutritional profile and palatability!
Try making baits with a really high level of coarse materials, such as precooked seeds and grains of more unusual kinds and in larger sizes. For instance, wheat cooked in Minamino, then added to your bait mix, or whole hemp soaked in liquid proteins, spice oleoresins etc then added to your boilie base mix. (A boilie base mix is the dry powders, meals etc, that you will add to your liquids to form dough or paste bait.)
If you heat up your baits by boiling, use totally chemical free water, such as mineral water, or at the very least, filtered water.
If boiling your baits remember you will actually lose a very significant part of the feeding stimulation and attraction of your baits into the boiling water so it is lost from baits prematurely; for this reason spike your water with added water soluble substances, such as yeast extract, hydrolysed protein complexes and enhancers and sweeteners etc.
These might even be honey, smooth peanut butter, jam or marmalade, curry source, crab paste, tomato puree, liquidised fruits or liquidised liver; look into why you are doing this and why you are choosing these substances (see my ebooks!)
Remember carp are dynamically learning all the time from everything anglers condition them to be and do and avoid by bad experiences; so be different from the trendy boys on your lake even if they are catching fish; it is an illusion because you can beat them at their own game by being totally different I assure you!
Try impregnating boilies or pastes with different pellets with the freshest and best quality pellets you can source. For example try Carpfishingpellets, and CC Moore; adding these will seriously multiply the various great incentives your fish have for taking your baits compared to other competing baits!
When fishing never over-look the advantage of fishing over combinations of boilies instead of just one recipe. Fish are individuals and each has their own unique sensitivities to tastes, smells and nutritional needs at any point in time etc, plus some are far more wary than others; so think about this and other related individual factors fish as individuals have so you at last catch that rarely caught monster in your water OK!
Make your baits alive! You can make your baits very seriously potent in terms of bioactivity and the impacts of substances in your baits on not merely carp senses acting on them at multiple levels simultaneously, but also you can provide extremely powerful incentives for fish to keep on repeatedly consuming your baits again and again!
Making baits that are genuinely addictive and habit-forming cumulatively and even instantly is no myth. So discover how it is truly done, and how to keep ahead of fish when they get warier; such secrets require a certain level of understanding that anyone can acquire by some reading of my secrets ebooks.
Why use boilies when you can air dry paste as free baits and use scalded paste hook baits; this is far more efficient and effective so use this OK!
If you must boil or steam your baits then replace some of the surface feed triggering and attraction factors in your baits by dusting them as they cool off with certain water-soluble substances (refer to my biography!)
If you are dependant upon readymade baits that is just not necessary; readymade bait bosses learnt their craft in their sheds and on their kitchen tables and so can you! So save yourself loads of money by doing this and improve your understanding of bait and multiply your catches big-time!
Avoid wasting time making round boilies! Most boilies are rounded whether uniformly machine rolled round baits, pressed baits, or chopped pellets or cylinders or barrels. With the modern methods of bait delivery via spod rockets and ground bait launchers and bait boats and all the rest you do not need to make round boilies ever again (and using totally uniquely-shaped baits will catch you far mare big fish!)
If you use readymade baits that the masses can get hold of then create your own bait edges. For instance soak into them a homemade combination of a homemade flavoured oil, flavour, enhancer, sweetener and liquid protein complex, (see down for such secrets and details.)
Try making baits that dissolve very fast indeed, and that leave a deposit of larger particles of crushed nuts, seeds, coarse kelp, soaked insects, pellets and other fragments scattered on the bottom and suspended in the water column to seriously excite and trigger your fish into getting hooked on your hook baits!
Here is a great question about boilies: How many anglers have tested over a long period of time fishing over free bait boilies that are totally a mixture of carefully designed and selected bait mixes? This refers to different recipes, varied nutritional profiles, mixed sizes, colours and flavours, and are composed of dramatically different shapes, textures, buoyancies, densities, solubilities and hardnesses (do yourself a big favour and do it!)
I always laugh when people in magazines go on about chopped boilies. I mean chopped boilies are already boiled or steamed and rolled into pretty shapes (what an expensive waste! Prepare your own boilie mixes, make them into dough. Roll the dough flat and roughly chop really fast into odd shapes and odd sizes. Then heat them or air-dry them and mix your various finished baits together for really awesome unique bait impacts, properties and impacts on fish that are extremely competitive compared to standard readymade baits and takes no time to make with such little effort at all!
You can very easily make extremely potent productive baits without any bait gun, bait rolling and rolling tables; these are a total waste of time in my opinion; why make baits that replicate characteristics of rounded, dense commercial baits that fish find all to easy to avoid getting hooked on?
Always remember that being different and preferably always being unique in your baits and personal approach, and tactics and most of all your thinking, is your greatest fishing edge!
A new bivvy, or a new set of rods, reels or alarms will not do this for you! So do yourself a totally massive favour and really think about what makes your fish harder to catch. Most usually it is your own thinking about the fish, their behaviours and changes and adaptations to your fishing pressure and the baits modes of action and impacts inside fish and the fishing methods you use and so on.
But think about this; even more commonly the greatest barrier to you catching the maximum numbers of fish possible is most usually your own lack of thinking! But you have all the power you need between your ears if you use it creatively and with imagination. Gaining the really big picture about how and why your baits actually work to defeat fish defensive behaviours and instinctive caution is such a giant advantage over 95 percent of anglers you will ever fish against!
Only people who do not seriously know about bait dismiss having credible bait and fish knowledge as a factor of secondary importance, because with it you can dictate fish behaviours, train fish responses and tastes and preferences and even condition their locations, travelling routes and to a degree feeding times and much more to ensure you catch the fish of your dreams instead of just dreaming on and hoping like the vast majority do!
Knowing how to create unique incredibly powerful fish-feeding opportunities for yourself, means you will never again be sitting behind your rods with no clue and thinking you need to change to yet another line or brand of readymade bait! 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!
By Tim Richardson.
