Friday, December 26, 2008

25 Easy Fishing Bait Tips To Catch You Bags Of Big Carp!

By Tim Richardson

New baits are the key to consistently catching big carp because they will be treated with far less caution than any baits they have been hooked on previously! You might favor particle baits like peanuts or tiger nuts, or instant baits high in concentrated flavors or nutritionally stimulating baits. But whatever it is you can be sure that keeping them different to what has been used before is absolutely essential for consistent catches.

So if being new and different with your baits is the key to most consistently staying ahead of the fish and fellow anglers and making fish far easier to catch compared to over-used popular baits, how might you achieve this edge? The short answer is every substance you use to soak into your readymade baits or include in your own homemade baits has the potential to breathe new life into your bait and improve or prolong catches on it. This in effect turns your bait into a fresh new one which the fish may well regard with less caution.

Many baits simply tantalise the fish and evoke a curiosity response rather than provide anything nutritional and many angler get confused thinking that baits absolutely must be an perfect square meal to get takes, but this is completely untrue. Any change you make to a bait can induce a curiosity response from a fish regardless of any other olfaction or other chemoreception stimulation which might be present in the bait. Carp feed using far more senses than merely taste and smell and all can be exploited for improved and prolonged more consistent results!

It has been said that even changing to a new flavor can improve results and this is true. Flavors are probably the most famous and popular but least understood fishing bait ingredients for thousands of fish species. They can be exceptionally varied in their contents and effects upon fish senses and how they work is often shrouded in theories and tank tests with little in common with real fishing conditions.

Your bait will have a smell and taste even though it may have had no flavors added. Every ingredient you put into a bait has some impact upon it and bait ingredients do not work in isolation but together synergistically and this is how they affect fish senses and fish digestion too. Fish are totally aware of all this and can even detect the components of flavors in their instinctive search for potential food that might provide essential dietary requirements or simply an energy requirement; energy is essential for all life. Intrinsic flavors and smells exist in baits long after our own human senses cannot detect them. Flavors will act differently in air compared to water and this is very significant for example in regards solubility, use through the seasons and rate of diffusion of attractors through the water to pull fish towards your bait.

In the case of big carp, they can be caught on baits containing strong powerful flavors or minimal amounts or none at all. The angling fishing pressure they receive 24 hours a day will often influence which approaches and which forms of flavor are more stimulatory or more repellant! But even using rubber and plastic baits will eventually be associated with previous captures and be less effective for this reason.

It is obvious that nearly any bait will catch a carp once. Much of the reason fake plastic and rubber baits catch carp is the lack of suspicion aroused by them, compared to conventional round boilies for example. This often because they do not contain the concentrated substances carp can recognise and relate to previous experiences of getting caught, but even these baits are far from sterile, having natural and human hand added attraction too like butyric acid.

Out of the potential millions of substances you can exploit to make your bait different, new and totally unique consistently over time there are those which have been proven very successful, especially for the bigger fish and many are well known ingredients and flavors offered by bait companies. But there are of course many ingredients and substances not known by the majority of anglers which are either quietly being used by bait companies or not at all and many have yet to be discovered. We can use our own food ingredients as useful guides to what to use to enhance and differentiate our baits to improve results, as we share similar senses and essential needs as fish (albeit in very specific areas.)

The natural foods which carp have survived and evolved to exploit in their natural environments have had more than just impacted upon the senses which detect these foods. Even the carp body itself has evolved physically in order to best detect, consume, digest and extract the maximum essential nutrition and energy it needs for survival. Betaine is found in many natural foods from root crops like sugar beet to molluscs and crustacean and fish themselves and even we humans contain betaine and it is a real essential!

In fact I focus on betaine because it has an even more intense feeding stimulation impact on carp sensory systems than the fellow feeding stimulator, the amino acid alanine. Most anglers already appreciate the impacts of amino acids upon fish feeding but do not relate this intense feeding response to hardly any other substances. But just in the same way that betaine and amino acids are significant growth and health and balance promoters etc, thousands of other substances have very significant bioactive effects on fish we can exploit in baits for big fish.

The vast diversity of substances that you can exploit and manipulate in our baits and many forms of ground baits etc to induce bite from carp are endless. But to make things clearer I have been able myself to categorise great numbers of these extremely desirable substances, ingredients, flavors etc into groups including their sources, uses and biological effects on carp. This has been extremely valuable but took over a full year to complete. You can do a bit of this yourself next time you read an ingredients list on a can of cola, bar of chocolate, readymade meal, can of beans, microwavable curry, and try and identify the substances which turn your body and senses on and make you want to eat more; it makes you think! The popularity of camp and fishing, boating and hunting and outdoors hobbies for sport and recreation combine well together, but bait is always the deciding factor if you catch fish or not despite all your efforts; so learn as much as you can and transform your catches!

By Tim Richardson. - 16752

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