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Many fishermen would love to make their own secret homemade carp and catfish baits from their personally chosen ingredients but are fearful in case they don't actually work!
But often, anglers have been confused by the myriad of information which often serves to complicate rather than simplify this exciting process. This article will show you how to make your baits and test them to GUARANTEE they will be successful and fill you with confidence through very positive results and great catches!
Many people have heard of dedicated dough baits, paste and boilie bait base mixes.
These are a combination of dry powdered ingredients which can be mixed with water, eggs or other liquids, to create a mouldable dough to create baits in paste form, or boilied to form more long-lasting skinned boiled baits.
Base mix design is fun because they can incorporate such a wide variety of ingredients, for different effects, and to target different species in different ways.
But do you start by just choosing ingredients at random and hoping they mix together, or is there an easier method of controlling your exploratory mixing of ingredients?
Well, one idea is to mix together just enough powdered ingredients that if you mix them with one egg or a quarter of a cup of water, then they would mix together and bind together into a dough. Now at this test stage if you have your various ingredients in the right amounts (ratio), they will bind correctly to form a smooth mouldable dough.
Once you have tried small amounts of different ratios of your ingredients and noted the amounts in each mix tested, you will now have your own personal guide to which combinations form a practical, mouldable or rollable dough or paste; just right for making balls of bait for hook baits, or to boil in water to make boilies.
It does take a small amount of trial and error to reach this stage, but by using only small amounts of ingredients at a time you will only waste a fraction, compared to incorrectly mixing much larger amounts of perhaps expensive ingredients, and then discovering they will not bind together, or roll together, or they might even repel the fish!
Of cause, the design of the bait mix you use for your fish is paramount to successful big fish captures, and you need to test your new mix before making loads of perhaps ineffective bait! It is possible to make bait that seems nutritional and attractive, but actually, for some unforeseen reason, it does not catch fish!
So, it is advisable to test your new bait mixes on fish before possibly wasting time fishing with it. In the early days of making bait, I recall fishing for carp one night just casting out when I arrived and leaving the baits until morning, but without any fish caught. I discovered the bait only lasted half an hour before dissolving! A quick test before fishing would have saved a wasted night when the carp were truly feeding well, whilst I slept well!
Try leaving your new baits / boilies in a cup of water of different temperatures, and time how long they last before they break down, or how long it takes to flavor the water with attractors. This is really useful to your confidence to know this for a fact and demonstrates to you how your bait performs under water; something most anglers never experience for themselves!
Perhaps feed some of your new bait to fish in a garden pond, or seen feeding on the surface of your lake. You could even make your baits as instant floaters perhaps by micro waving them for very short periods until they star to be able to float in a test cup of water. (Try not to burn them!)
Watching the reactions of surface feeding fish feeding on your new baits is an instant indication of the power of attraction your baits may have or not, especially if you feed them alongside a bait you already know is exceptionally good like a top proven shop bought bait. When fish attention to your new bait is equal or even better than that given to the other control bait, then youre on a winner!
Or leave them in shallow marginal areas at the edges of your lake or river, and aim to actually observe the feeding reactions of fish to your bait over a morning or evening feeding spell to see how confidently the fish enter the baited area and feed on the new baits. You might be in for a real surprise!
For example, I made a new carp bait once, with a new sweet appetite stimulator powder incorporated into the baits original dry mix. I just tested the paste dough version instead of boilies. I wished to see if I had over loaded the bait with this new ingredient, and made it repellant to carp! I had aimed to improve the new bait, by enhancing it with a new instant feeding trigger carp response.
Having dropped pieces of the new bait into a marginal lake feeding area I waited for carp to feed, and was elated at the response, as instead of fleeing the area, they kept returning with more of their carp friends to enjoy this new delicious feast; until it was all gone. My only regret was I wasnt fishing for them at the time; it would have been great fun!
I have made many dry ingredient base mixes that would not roll evenly to form a paste, many using fish meals with a rough or grainy texture, many of which turned out to be fairly insoluble and requiring substantial water or eggs to make them bind together to other ingredients.
The same can be said of bird food ingredients. But these mistakes are never wasted and can indeed be the perfect bait for a different situation or fishing circumstance. Many a mix that would not roll has become used as a fantastically effective free bait or form the very attractive and nutritional ground bait.
I remember trying to make bait using flaked rice and spirulina based cold water fish food. I added to it some semolina (wheat based flour) as a binder and lots of molasses and egg biscuit bird food. But I had not added enough semolina; once I had added some eggs to help binding, the mix would bind together, but not roll to form bait balls.
Instead of adding more poor nutritional value semolina, I decided to use this new sugar bait as I called it, as a new experimental ground bait. (It was extremely tacky and stuck to my hands like glue.) So I went fishing using my current base mix boilies for hook baits, and used some of the new failed paste mix as small finger molded baits, to use as carp attracting close proximity attractor baits. These were baiting needle fed onto dissolving poly vinyl alcohol (PVA)strings tied to the hooks.
Having cast out two hook baits in a line at right angles from the bank, and catapulted out a line of new sticky sugar paste baits directly over the top of them things started to happen.
What a surprise! Normally it could take an hour to 6 hours or more to get the carp to really get feeding on the bait, as demonstrated by their head and shouldering surface movements, diving on the baits and bubbling activity. Almost immediately, four carp rolled simultaneously, along the baited line. It took just five minutes for the first carp run to occur.
Then runs just kept coming for the next hour and a half. (I lost count how many!) This was at a time when it could take 24 hours to produce that number of takes; so this was truly exceptional. This was an important lesson to me in the value of using paste or dough baits instead of boilie baits whose results really were much less.
This was such another striking example of how a new bait can trigger an instant carp feeding response, and it stuck in the memory. A very similar bait hooked the largest fish in this particular lake (Shotgate, Essex.) This came merely two minutes after casting out the bait out! On a different lake, (South Weald Essex,) a similar paste bird food bait with high levels of sugars, molasses and the famous Rod Hutchinson Chocolate Malt flavour, produced even more stunning responses from the big fish there.
There were many, many such examples of experimental baits producing fantastic results, some being yeast and spices based, some being fish meal based, and others being milk protein and body building powders based. Again some of these baits were so packed with attractive energy boosting sugars and were so soluble they proved exceptional alternative instant baits; many producing the lakes biggest fish almost after the first cast!
Testing new baits is so exiting at times; I made a trip to Dream Lakes in France, one year. I had been testing a new ground bait made from a boilie base mix packed with taurine rich squid extract. This bait was not cheap, but all my experience and bait knowledge told me it was a fantastic edge to take to a fishery with such consistently high angling pressure.
Fishing the often harder to fish Dream Lake 1 each morning I fed just one grapefruit sized ball of this ground bait into the edge of the lake right next to the bank at a difficult to cast to place. This would be just before breakfast time, at which point I would make my way up to the anglers lodge for a half hour social.
Upon returning to the baited spot the water would literally be black! Such was the feeding response to this bait; my confidence in catching was so high I couldnt wait to cast a rod out, and it sometimes only took a few seconds to initiate a carp take!
I realise now, that the majority of my most successful bait mixes and ground bait mixes have come about more by accident and doing things wrong as much as by design as most great inventions are!
You may be wondering if you could be missing out on exceptionally exciting catches by your ritualistically and habitually buying your most important fishing competitive edge at the shop, rather than solving your special fishing needs and requirements yourself.
Why not break the lazy habits the majority of fishermen seem to have these days; try going fishing with your own homemade baits, and make sure you take loads of spare film for the camera!
This fishing bait secrets book author has many more fishing and bait edges up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches.
By Tim Richardson.
These are the best guides to improve your catches:
BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS! AND BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS! AND "BIG CARP FLAVOURS, FEEDING TRIGGER & CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS" SEE:
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