So you want to know more about bait in order to catch more fish? I am amazed at the kinds of questions I get asked about bait week in week out. Frankly 99 percent of all these questions are totally irrelevant when it comes to what most matters about how baits work best! I think that what has happened is that people are stuck in a mindset very misguidedly uses commercial readymade baits as their reference point of what baits are ideally like when in fact the best reference point is not that at all!
Now consider this fact; most readymade boilies are extruded or shaped by machine. Usually the description used is rolled. Funnily enough most of the more successful baits used these days (even zig rig artificial foam baits,) are not a smooth round shape at all. I hope this tells you something here about carp reference points. They are obviously less wary and more easily fooled by the erratic movement and rough texture of baits that are not made into uniform smooth surface shapes by machine.
For some years now bait shapes other than round have been offered as being superior, and by this I mean those barrel shapes and more cylindrical shapes. But these are regarded by just as much caution as other smooth rounded baits and why should they not be when carp get to experience them and practice avoiding them 24 hours a day year in year out?
So here is an example of another round bait that is not exactly optimised for success. A new readymade boilie bait made using anchovy and tuna, with added green lipped mussel extract has been advertised in the glossy magazines, and is advertised as being designed by a famous bait designer. It even states on the advert that the dark green colour represents a natural food source and yes they are green but so what? The fact is that these are the so very familiar smooth surfaced round baits with an all too familiar density and consistency and lack of optimised solubility so ultra common in readymade baits!
I do not like round baits and I prefer to avoid using such readymade baits even when made by the companies I am a consultant for; that is how anti-productive I know rounded baits really are! You might think looking at all the pictures in magazines that they are brilliant, but that is because millions of anglers are producing those pictures and you are missing the bigger picture that round baits are crap. They really have had their day when it comes to wary fish, and most big old fish we want to catch are wary by now!
The carp bait industry like the rest of the fishing industry is simply a machine orientated to harness the herding mentality humans most often express; that is where the most profits are. So that is why the best baits ever marketed have been failures, simply because often they were not popular for some reason, maybe because they did not fit the mindset of what a bait should be like, or maybe added to this that they were not easy or simple to utilize as preparation or mixing is technical. Never the less, the best carp baits have been commercial failures.
If you want the most effective carp baits you have to make them yourself in order to optimise all the aspects of maximised most potent bioactive, very active concentrated leakage of additives, ingredients, various addictive factors and enhancing and activating substances etc into solution which is an absolute must! Such baits are not straight forward to use, take a lot more effort to refine and prepare and loads of care to fish with correctly, yet with practice all this becomes easier and easier, and the fish have no chance when they experience them!
One of the biggest problems with very familiar rounded commercial baits is they are so familiar and so easy for carp to avoid after years of repetitive practice no matter what recipes are employed! I can tell you about a video clip of a wary 60 pound plus mirror actually fanning away such specifically round familiar baits to get at the irregular baits between them! I say forget rolling tables and round baits. No-one needs them! We can all deliver baits over 200 meters away with accuracy using an array of means without any requirements of baits of any rounded or barrel shape at all! Why keep using a bait characteristic that is actually a proven barrier to catching wary fish?
Part of the problem of perception of bait is that so many anglers think bait is high quality when they have little idea of the full meaning of this phrase. Bait is really about potency to activate bait-induced behaviours within fish, but 99 percent of readymade bait just does not do this to truly optimised levels of potential fish response because commercial baits are a compromise for profit. This is also because truly optimised baits are not easy to fish with as they are so soluble, and most anglers are so fear-ridden they prefer to fish with a very under-optimised bait i.e. one that will still be an intact ball leaching very little after 8 hours after initial immersion compared to a truly optimised bait!
You might consider that such claims are extreme or abnormal. They are simply the direct result of testing and assessing a massive diversity of readymade and homemade baits and their components and characteristics and modes of operation and interactions with water, fish senses, fish physiology and bait-induced behaviours etc, for the past 6 years, and writing about such findings full-time!
I might add that among the most nutritionally stimulating most potently healthy foods fish and humans consume are foods and substances that have been fermented. Even probably the most used natural flavour in the world is a fermented bean namely vanilla. Geraniol and other monoterpenes used in carp fishing are predominantly found in the essential oils of fruits and herbs.
Examples of the terpenes geraniol, limonene and menthol show you from that they are linked closely with plants. Most terpenes were found originally in plants. Having spent decades as a professionally trained commercial horticulturalist and plant grower, naturally I took especial interest in such potent substances as I was handling plants all the time and experiencing their aromas and odours and sensations of their oils when contacting my skin, and different ones created different sensations, even mood altering ones! (Of course altering mood is a keystone of the most potent carp baits work!)
Terpenes also come from bergamot and rose for example and each has been applied successfully to fishing baits, but there is so much more to be exploited by the homemade bit maker that no commercial bait maker is using!
The terpene called vanillin was first isolated from vanilla. It has a very distinct sweet odour and is often used on its own as a vanilla flavour. The forms of vanilla extracts and flavours you get from supermarkets are all terribly watered down versions usually mixed with alcohol and water and not worth the price. One easy suggestion to naturally flavour your baits of any kind with vanillin is to use vanilla extract powder, which is a mixture of sweet meals and fine ground vanilla pod. As a consultant for CC Moore I know this great product really works so do exploit it!
If you find it difficult to find readymade baits in shapes other than rounded then make your own! Bait companies pump out rolled baits simply because it is profitable and punters have a brain-washed round bait mindset that is simply based on nothing that is relevant any more in today’s very pressured fishing environment! (It is called subliminal conditioning to splash carp magazines and other advertising with constant images of rounded baits!)
In fact when it comes to making non-rounded baits homemade baits it means hours of labour are dismissed instantly and baits are made in just minutes as no extruding and no rolling is involved! For all of you that really get it by now and are not still hypnotized by images of pretty perfectly round pop up baits sitting on a rig in a tank, I expect you now want to know what to do to avoid being a round bait sheep – and really improve your catches! 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.
English