Fishing Frenzy

How your bait can really make a big difference to your catches in hidden and very obvious ways!

The scientific information available on essential dietary needs of carp most often does not take into account the presence of natural food in the presence of a test food item such as that of milk casein and gelatine. In fact it really makes a big difference when you consider that a carp is fully designed to fully digest and utilise its natural food items as opposed to an artificial food item composed of many foods such as in a boilie bait or pellet designed for salmon, trout or even specifically designed for carp! The actual energy and nutrient requirements compared to the actual biological conversion and energy supplied may well not be as great nor as efficient as thought by anglers.

Carp feeding stimulation involves many carp senses in a combined way; so why not exploit as many as possible to maximise our baits, after all; (baits do not merely work by exploiting nutritional stimulation but many other factors too!) We can take into account real life fishing variables such as the way carp exploit various natural food sources as the season progresses and this will impact on bait design and bait recipes, type of baits used and how they are applied on the hook and introduced as ground bait. When fish are very much orientated to feed upon natural organisms then this too can be exploited by good bait design, and we can exploit and manipulate the presence of natural organisms by using our bait to deliberately attract these too.

When I look back to my early carp fishing days of the 1970's I recall using a bucket of ground bait made from bread crumbs, perhaps cans of sweetcorn or luncheon meat or various special pastes, particle baits like wheat, pearl barley, hemp or live baits like worms or maggots. In the last 30 years carp fishing has exploded into a highly commercialised activity, and today introducing many kilograms of boilies, pellets or particle baits among others, all produce fish. Having seen someone catch a forty pound carp from a UK water, just ten minutes after introducing 20 kilograms of soluble pellets into his swim (done under suitable circumstances,) made me appreciate even more how heavy baiting can be truly decisive in many big and wary carp captures!

When I look back to the 1970's and 1980's, often carp catches composed of single and double figure fish because much of the time was spent fishing waters that had yet to grow fish to over twenty or thirty pounds. It seems mad that today on the right waters, you can pretty easily catch perhaps 5 twenty pound fish in a day plus many other big double figure carp, when 25 years ago such a catch would be the total for a successful season on the vast majority of UK waters! Because bigger carp simply did not exist in anywhere near the huge numbers and exceptionally bigger sizes found in UK waters today, it is very difficult for those newer to carp fishing today to imagine just how incredibly hard carp fishing used to be in the UK.

I recall in the early 1990's the first guy to catch twenty carp weighing over twenty pounds in a season on my Essex syndicate lake when I had only 7 over twenty that season myself, but only took 2 years later I achieved this myself and it seems that carp weights have been accelerating over the last 2 decades much to the pleasure of us anglers! Anyone who really does their homework can achieve the capture of twenty carp in a week of around twenty pounds or over, and the waters that can produce this will tend to produce quite a few bigger bonus specimens too. For the average angler, the effective application and leverage of bait is critical in being able to consistently achieve big catches of carp and the more you can get to understand about bait applications and how baits works, the more consistently good your results can be with the least wastage in bait!

I just realised it is now 18 years since I had a personal milestone catch of twenty carp whose average weight was just less than twenty pounds, including a mid-thirty pound carp, in just 5 days. My homemade bait recipe design especially, and the way I introduced my free baits, made all the difference in achieving this exceptional catch at that Essex syndicate water back in 1991 and UK carp have had twenty years since to grow fat on the tonnes of bait very many thousands more carp anglers have been introducing to UK carp waters all year round! If you consider that carp soon get very conditioned to baits and practice avoiding hook baits in many carp waters 24 hours a day, the significance of knowing that bit more about bait, how it works, and how to apply it in new and creative ways is obviously highly important to consistent success today.

I know anglers in Spain, France, and in the States and elsewhere can achieve catches that far exceed those possible in the UK; but still it is the effective suitable application of bait that really is a predominant and vital key factor in such giant fish catches. If you speak to leading anglers in various countries around the world, you discover that detailed bait know-how is one topic that is of crucial importance. Considering that carp are extraordinarily adaptive creatures, it is no surprise that by improving our knowledge of how our baits works and how to adapt and apply them creatively has always kept us ahead...

By Tim Richardson.