Sunday, December 7, 2008

Improve Your Carp Baits And Catch More Big Summer Fish!

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.

Easy homemade bait dips can be produced using the spare oil from canned fish or fresh mashed fish juices. Sandwich pastes and pates mixed with warm water are very effective too and shrimp, crab, duck and liver plus many others all work. You can mix easily available flavours in too, like fine rock salt, ketchup, fish source and anchovy source and fruit cordial juices etc. You will find your homemade boilies work better if you steam for a couple of minutes instead of boiling in their stimulating attractors and so on.

Paste or dough is great used as a coating around all kinds of other hook baits. With paste you know there is no barrier from boiled protein as with conventional boilies that prevent most of your baits attraction from reaching the fish to stimulate them into feeding! Among the items around the kitchen to use are tinned salmon, tuna, herring, mackerel, anchovies and pilchards which can all be made into paste with added eggs and wheat flour to bind; it's simple but works!

If you use readymade baits like boilies and pellets or even prepared particle baits like nuts or seeds or tinned meats, you will get more takes by altering the surface coating. Make it irregular shaped as if other fish have already been chewing at the bait. This helps release the baits intrinsic attractive substances too. Another trick when using boilies is to poke them with a knife point or baiting needle to go deep inside the bait to release attraction - it really works and changes the bait surface into a very unusual and irregular texture too with all its advantages!

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!

Many big fish can tell which baits are hook baits by their behaviour in the water and their weight and buoyancy. Using a more buoyant hook bait can seriously fool these fish where blank sessions could well occur on mere conventional bottom baits! It might come as a surprise but you can easily make pastes from scalded pellets and other baits too.

You might liquidise your readymade baits and mix with eggs and a little wheat flour or other glue-like ingredients (caseins and caseinates are extremely effective containing high protein levels.) This way you can fish a conventional bait which has an unusual coating which is alternative but different and closely matches your hook bait; there is no doubt about it that fish learn and experiments with goldfish performing tricks using food rewards like dogs shows the 15 second memory is just a myth - carp learn! So do yourself a favour and try being different with your baits especially as it is your the bait that truly hooks your fish and the more you know about bait the more power you will have over your fish!

By Tim Richardson. - 16492

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