Fishing Frenzy

Many fishermen avoid making their own baits but secretly wished they could to save money. The fact is that making your own very effective baits is far easier than you might think and you can use most of the ingredients and similar recipes that commercial bait makers have used successfully for years. You just need a little know-how in order to catch bags of big fish and to save yourself a fortune!

Carp live on mostly protein based foods which contain essential fats and oils which provide most of their energy; in their natural water environment carbohydrate foods are rare. In contrast to humans therefore, carp do not use carbohydrates, but oils and proteins for their energy requirements and process these extrememely efficiently which is not surprising as carp have long evolved to do this. This is why making baits using protein ingredients is more beneficial from a dietary needs of carp perspective and also why protein ingredients and oils are so feed-stimulatory to carp too.

Proteins are composed of amino acids which carp can easily detect and find stimulating; and there are around 10 plus essential ones which carp cannot synthesise in there own body and must consume in their food to survive. The carp essential amino acids list includes: Histidine, leucine, isoleucine, valine, tryptophan, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine and arginine and carp will eat foods and baits containing any of these as they are essential to them. Exploiting protein ingredients in your baits is obviously a good thing as you are offering something fish need to survive.

Both carp and humans have become physically adapted to get the most energy efficiently from our foods which are available to us. This can be exploited by actually using carp senses normally naturally used to detect food substances, in order to induce fish to feed on our baits. Apart from proteins and amino acids there are thousands of other substances to induce feeding behaviour from carp of various levels of intensity or activity, so you will never be short of an idea to make your baits unique to keep ahead!

Amino acid needs of carp are important because we can exploit them even in very simple baits to induce better feeding on baits and more bites. But these essential are not absolutely necessary to catch fish on homemade baits; far from it in fact and you can very often catch fish on competitive pressured fisheries on simple carbohydrate wheat and soya type baits which are extremely economical to make! To keep ahead of the fish you might simply just change certain aspects of the bait like attractors such as flavours or even treacles, honey, molasses, cordial syrups, or liqueurs etc.

There seems to be some snobbery in regards to protein based baits compared to using cereal or carbohydrate based baits for example based on wheat or semolina or soya flour. In fact many very economical baits can be made from these ingredients which will just keep catching carp on many fisheries for years. All you need to do to keep catching carp on many waters is to keep changing your attractors regularly as in flavours, various specialist protein extracts, and proprietary fish stimulants and so on.

These days there is an abundance of over-stocked carp fisheries to choose from and your bait, whatever it may be is generally regarded as natural food by these hungry fish. This is one big reason why homemade simple baits will catch anywhere, but then any bait fished correctly will catch the biggest, wariest fish on the richest of waters. When you know a bit more about bait and how to really make it work for you efficiently are far reduced costs, the rewards will shock you; I have made homemade baits for decades and saved myself a fortune and caught enough big fish on readymade dominated fisheries to say that 80 percent of all my homemade baits over the years have caught big fish whatever they have been based on!

Many carp fishermen get confused between the nutritional aspect of bait as opposed to the stimulatory aspect and assume that a bait absolutely needs to be totally nutritionally attractive and stimulating as a complete food in order to do the job, but this is just not true. Many perceived simple ingredients may have very surprising nutritional attraction in any key aspect whether it be vitamins, or minerals, oils or some other aspect like simulating something which carp naturally eat confidently (many flavours do this but have zero nutritional value.) It is a fact however, that amino acids rank among the most highly feeding stimulatory substances for carp and so exploiting this aspect in your baits is advantageous, but then you have endless other possibilities and combinations to choose from, to save you money and hook you those dream fish; all you need is to know a bit more about bait!

By Tim Richardson.