Fishing Frenzy

We fishermen pay lots of money for readymade fishing baits! The fact is that if they were so wonderful, companies would not have to keep on offering new baits all the time! Just the same number of fish or more, can be caught as a result of making your own unique baits and this will save you bags of money too!

Having a unique bait is one of the greatest competitive advantages in fishing. This is very often the factor which tips fish over from the state of just testing a bait, to actually taking it into its mouth along with your hook, and giving a very desirable run. There is no doubt in my mind after over 3 decades of making homemade fishing baits, that they can compete against commercial readymade baits on any water or venue.

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.

This is a point lost on most readymade bait users! The great edge of bait is being different to ones fish wary of already as a result of previous hooking and captures on it. So make your baits as unique as possible as frequently as you think your results indicate you may need to.

On the point about fish learning by association, you will also find with readymade baits that they frequently have to be changed to new ones because they get over-used and fish associate them with danger of hooking or capture. Whereas with homemade bait this rarely happens because you alone are fishing your bait so it cannot get over-used so intensively as readymades. This means your baits will remain effective very likely indefinitely which means you can focus on your fishing and have complete confidence that your bait is always working to best effect and has not blown! Some baits get based around flavor attraction on a carbohydrate ingredient base mix. Many others utilise to a greater extent a food bait approach using nutrition as the fish feeding triggering mechanism.

It might sound hard, but making baits that really work effectively is easy, and your baits do not need to be perfect like commercially produced machine rolled round or barrel shaped boilies or pellets shapes etc. There are obviously very many methods of making baits and you do not need to follow conventional steps at all, in fact there are many steps you can leave out completely. This makes things very much easier, saves hours of time and take the least effort possible!

Many fisherman overlook the advantages of not making their baits oval in shape. Remember carp remember, so using angular baits or non oval baits is a definite advantage. Just with a handful of eggs and a pound of semolina and soya flour you can make limitless different baits utilising any of thousands of additives and flavors, sweeteners and appetite stimulators and so on, or just one! Such a bait will form a protective skin if you drops pieces of such baits in water or scald them with steam. Why bother boiling your baits when bait which is merely dried in warm air are frequently more effective than boilies?

Making baits is very easy. You merely need a large container to mix your ingredients in and a knife or spoon to mix the materials to form a practical bait dough. First just get a handful of eggs and a teaspoonful of cake flavor and mix together well, then add your dry powders, etc a bit a time until a firm dough is reached.

Now you can use the dough as fresh bait or opt to label some sealed plastic bags and store it in the fridge for a few days or to freeze it in advance of going fishing. You most likely will forget what you made your baits out of so it is best to write this somewhere so you can remake your winning baits repeatedly! It is possible to get a ball of dough weighing about a kilogram from a 6 egg mixture; this will obviously vary depending upon the various ingredients you choose to include and their levels. Some ingredients will hold water better than others while some might dissolve readily in water, and the practical advantages of each kind are easy to exploit depending if you want hard baits which break down slowly or ones which dissolve and spread their attraction very quickly.

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!

homemade baits can look very unusual to a readymade bait user, but then when a fish encounters it is very much more likely to take it into its mouth, than a more conventional bait it sees 24 hours a day with a hook in it. This is why so many homemade baits catch so many big fish compared to very many readymade baits as the biggest fish have least reason to reject them out of conditioned fear through being hooked previously. Homemade bait makers might appear to get lots of beginners luck with big fish and this is no coincidence; unusually consistent big fish catches are very easily possible with a little more knowledge of bait making!

By Tim Richardson.