How To Make Homemade Carp Fishing Baits For Beginners Part 1

Frank Warwick personally recommended to me that I should start up my own bait company but instead my primary goal is to help you make your own uniquely potent homemade baits that defeat popular expensive readymade baits!

Far too many ordinary anglers struggle to catch the fish of their dreams by depending on readymade baits and expecting miracles without considering many of their cult angling heroes are often full time anglers with endless competitive advantages! Refined homemade baits are truly a great leveler so here are some very sound expert tips for making homemade baits for beginners, plus crucial top tips for more experienced anglers to improve their catches!

Understanding fish is the starting point of making the most consistently successful carp baits, whether boilies, paste or whatever format being created. Recipes and ingredients are completely secondary to understanding fish and guys like Martin Locke of Solar Tackle tell me they can make bait instinctively. I know exactly what he means by this and it has been a long and hard road to reach this stage of understanding. Understanding fish in relation to bait substances takes time and hours and hours of practical experience. Fish respond to baits in many surprising ways, sometimes in ways you would not expect; but everything is useful as you will find out!

For instance, certain types of salts make fish feed very aggressively shooting around head butting the bottom silt. Other forms of salts cause fish to monopolise a baited area and feed in a very calm methodical fashion as if they are not going anywhere else any time soon! Understanding how to make bait is really about understanding how fish work internally and externally within the context of a water environment packed with so many variable complex natural dynamics of predictable rhythms and cycles and ever changing patterns expressed in the various webs of life and ecosystems all intertwined.

But you can make homemade baits capable of out fishing any readymade bait and that is a fact! But this is provided you get the bigger picture of what is really important and keep on refining your baits for more and more optimum performance, more and more potency, and maximised functional qualities!

So what matters when thinking of making homemade baits to compete on waters dominated by readymade baits? I know many anglers wrongly feel intimidated by readymade baits dominating catches on their waters so I tell you this: It is completely irrelevant! If you happen to be fishing a water dominated by any particular readymade bait; forget that dynamic totally; just ignore it because it has so little bearing on your success with potently refined homemade baits!

In short the goal is to achieve as many bites as possible in as short a time as possible while providing at least a healthy or positive reward to your fish. If this reward is sweet, addictive and healthy but does not contain much in terms of protein who cares? I know many people who have raised very healthy fish in tanks using substances extremely rich in potent antioxidants and other biologically active compounds. How many anglers realise that fruits contain essential proteins too?

Even fish in over stocked poor water quality commercial day ticket waters supplement their diets with many changing natural proteinous food items year round. They eat phytoplankton and zooplankton, benthic invertebrates, mollusks and crustaceans and so on and indeed consume sediments rich in probiotic organisms and consume aquatic vegetation etc that provides prebiotic sustenance. If you are not a fish farmer you have no responsibility to feed fish; that is the job of the fishery owner to do and you pay to fish not to feed fish right?

Most fish in a balanced fishery have no actual requirement of anglers baits anyway and I argue that you are not going fishing and feeding fish, you are going fishing to hook fish and this are completely different! Too many anglers think that so called food baits are meant to feed fish but they are really about drawing feeding attention by utilizing the approach of nutritional stimulation. However this is merely one angle of approach so do not get hung up about it; you do not need to be expert in amino acids to out fish popular readymade baits so do not worry!

In rich waters you often discover that very highly potent but lower protein content baits catch fish by drawing their attentions away from very rich nutritional food sources. Rod Hutchinson proved his point using particles with such outstanding success despite him being so sophisticated in designing boilies of many forms! In poorer quality crowded waters the baits with higher soluble protein contents catch many fish because fish cannot remain healthy without the essential amino acids, but amino acids come from many sources, far more than people think! I know anyone can make baits to out fish the popular readymade baits without using any carbohydrate or protein rich ingredients whatsoever; so keep an open mind!

It might surprise you that I have a friend who has very healthy fish living in a tank living predominantly on chopped citrus fruit peel and berry skins. Look it up and you will discover that the bulk of healthy substances in fruits are found in the skins including stimulatory essential oils, antioxidants, metabolic stimulants, immune system boosters, vitamins and endless other biologically active substances.

Bait is not all about protein which is expensive and not all about economising using cereal or grain or other cheap forms of carbohydrates either!

Very effective baits can be made with just a handful of ingredients and additives but the aim is to maximise effectiveness by step by step refinements made methodically based on actual real catches feed back using new versions of test batches of baits. Anyone who thinks that just one rigid recipe will produce the same consistent results forever is in for a shock as fish are so wary today!(In fact there are many fish which will not touch round or smooth surfaced baits and baits containing egg but in making your own unique homemade baits such things are very simple to overcome!)

Citrus oils and citrus extracts for example are very popular in carp fishing and it might seem strange, but then again why should carp respond to Tutti Fruitti flavour, or chilli oil, or vanilla extract or sugar from sugar beet for example?

Fish respond to so many substances that they would never normally find naturally in their present environment but therein lays on insight into successful bait making.

Fish are opportunistic feeders and are endlessly adaptable to new sense and smell sensations and in order to more energy efficiently monopolise new nutritional sources carp and other fish can become more and more sensitive to new substances and analogues of these.

That is why when you have done well catching on a protein rich bait with a particular flavour label added, you can follow this up with a far cheaper carbohydrate bait with the same added flavour label, just as Andy Little did during his historic record breaking run of catches of thirties on Savay Lake.

The point of bait is to induce as many as possible mouthings of baits leading to as many as possible opportunities for your hooks to penetrate the mouths of carp. Some anglers seem to be very confused thinking that the point of bait is to feed fish. Fish may receive lots of nutrition from food type boilies for instance but contrary to any claims you see in all the glossy adverts, boilies are not the ultimate food source of carp. You might think this is madness but what if I told you that naturally the optimum nutritional food sources of carp do not deplete energy when carp digest their food but merely add to it? Well I will not go further on this point now, but this is a point that is very important!

The easiest way to get confused about bait is to listen to a load of different opinions and swallow them without truly finding your own path. There are a thousand and one and more different ways to make carp of various strains feed. Many carp and indeed any individual carp may be more or less sensitive to a myriad of substances. Most anglers do not start with carp as their bait making starting point. Instead they seem to think a great starting point is to be simply given a recipe, and then buy a big batch of ingredients.

Well the bad news is that baits may not blow but fish sure become wary of baits they have been hooked on previously. This is a major reason why I hate using popular readymade baits; how do you know just how many fish have been already hooked or pricked and lost on any particular popular readymade baits. This becomes far more important if you are hoping to target perhaps the biggest 10 fish in your lake.

There is a very sobering tale about Dave Lane who baited up for a whole season with a popular readymade bait and then of course some one else caught his target fish which was a fifty pound fish using the same bait as he was using. I mean that is not too smart and personally whatever bait I use I want it to be completely unique to me and making your own bait means you have control of everything about that bait including modes of action, cost, potency, and every single feature, property, characteristic and competitive edge you could possibly wish for!

I have fished certain lakes and got into the biggest fish catching them multiple times knowing for a fact that nobody can ever use the same bait I am using and they will never exploit all the expense and effort of my baiting; and that feels really good and gives me great boosted confidence in my baits! With a totally unique bait, fishing as an individual means you can seriously prolong the duration of your success and with just small ongoing refinements of your initial baits you can keep catches coming strong again and again, without your homemade baits ever blowing!

I will give you a pointer here to just one angle into starting to make your own unique homemade baits. Human milk contains 10 times the level of natural glutamate as cows milk. Glutamate is a naturally occurring amino acid that is a natural taste enhancer. Many amino acids are required by carp but that is not important right now because what matters here is merely introducing a simple method to induce feeding behaviour in carp. In humans the glutamate plus the milk sugar in milk are the primary feeding triggers that make babies consume mothers milk and consume the optimum nutrition nature has designed for them!

Glutamate happens to be a true feeding trigger to carp which means that carp with not simply sample baits rich in this feeding trigger; they will repeatedly consume such baits, thus giving you multiple chances of getting more bites and hooked fish!

The reason that glutamate is important is that it induces feeding and that is why human milk is so rich in it. It is also found in higher levels in many other substances including calcium caseinate, autolysed yeasts such as Marmite, mature cheeses, sea weeds, algae, tomatoes, yeasts and other fungi, fermented soy and many other substances including enzyme treated and predigested extracts and fermentation products and bye products etc.

The point I am making here is the connection between the starting point which is the knowledge that glutamate is a true feeding trigger to carp, and then focusing on examples of substances that are very rich in glutamate! Think fish sensitivity and actual operation internally and externally first and things become far clearer! If your staring point is an attempt to cobble a number of bait ingredients together at random you are bound to find your bait is merely a product of chance and luck and certainly not created step by step by design specifically to act on fish in very select potent ways!

I must add here a point of paramount importance. Fish most easily detect bait substances in solution i.e. not still as part of whole solid bait. Do not think of bait as any of those colourful objects you see all the time in the adverts; think of bait as the water surrounding your fish because when you view fish as literally swimming tongues you will always think of baits in a totally different way!

Many anglers new to making baits worry that it is too complicated but that is rubbish; bait can be a simple as you want to design your baits to be but do bear in mind that the goal is to achieve as many bites as possible! Therefore think of making homemade baits as a constant progression, using simple baits first and then methodically step by easy step constantly refining the best of the baits you can make bit by bit. With this approach your baits do not need to necessarily be the most complex baits, but can certainly become the most optimised baits for all the practical and functional aspects which will produce the most bites in your waters and out fish any popular readymade baits!

Cheeses are familiar well proven bait constituents and are very complex foods if you get into analyzing what they offer to carp in terms of stimulation and attraction! However, if you compare real catch results of using whole cubes of hard cheddar cheese compared to using a paste made from Parmesan cheese and blue cheese powder plus blue cheese flavour and butyric acid then the difference in results will be huge! Cheese is rich in glutamate, but glutamate like the important stimulatory amino acids (which are true feeding triggers and not merely just attractants) needs to be in solution and not bound up tightly inside your bait, to be most effective!

Many anglers might be thinking that the way to make a cheese bait is to use a preparatory boilie base mix and add cheese powder and eggs, or make a cheap semolina and soya flour base mix and add cheese powder and bind this with eggs. But neither of these examples will bring the best results when using cheese.

There is great historical evidence showing that carbohydrate based baits have very little stimulatory potency compared to baits actually deliberately designed based on true feeding trigger rich substances instead!

Personally I avoid semolina and other low feeding trigger content carbohydrate substances like the plague, as I know these really are a great way to reduce the potential potency of your baits. I mention this because with truly potent baits you only need a few to catch the same number of fish as great volumes of standard low protein carbohydrate baits or even standard fish meal type baits for that matter!

You may well include wheat germ and wheat bran for instance for various specific reasons to stimulate fish internally in cold water, improve bait digestion to get more bites etc, but to base baits on semolina purely for economical reasons is going to cost you loads of quality fish! Making semolina baits is about as big a waste of time as any bait I can think of! Having stated that, you certainly do not need to base baits entirely on high protein ingredients and in fact if you did then much of it would be wasted as unless such high protein baits are sorted for limiting amino acids then most of the protein will be excreted as waste.

I prefer to view protein rich substances in very detailed and specific terms as sources of particular true feeding triggers and exploit them for their solubility and easy digestion especially when proteins are in predigested or enzyme treated form and in free amino acid from etc. True feeding triggers are found in many food groups and are certainly not limited to proteins. It is easy enough to make a difference to water surrounding fish or coming into contact with them via a concentration gradient of flavours added to a bait that makes fish initially be curious enough to inspect new baits, however my main interest is to make them feed repetitively.

When fish feed repetitively you can often get the biggest multiple fish catches the fastest and easiest as the fish begin to compete against one another and make more mistakes on your hook baits! I say this from experience using homemade baits made time and again specifically designed for this very purpose! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!