New Baits For Carp fishing And Their Powerful Impacts!

Stimulating your fish to feed makes them much easier to catch! The ways of doing this by leveraging the power of your bait has multiplied vastly in recent years, and many things have changed, leading to bigger catch results for many more anglers in the know...

Often when studying bait and why it works, scientific tests utilise baits of gelatine and casein, but natural food is not present in tests and this is very important because it shows how many variables exist in real life fishing! Carp are evolved to digest natural food items they have found in their environment for eons of time, but angling baits need to be designed to be not only most nutritionally beneficial and digestible, but most potently stimulating to feeding too. The energy and nutrient requirements of carp in regards to baits we exploit are vitally important to us anglers because these can really boost our short-term captures and multiply cumulative catch results over time very significantly.

Carp feeding stimulation involves many carp senses in a combined way; so why not exploit as many as possible to maximise our baits, after all; (baits do not merely work by exploiting nutritional stimulation but many other factors too!) We can take into account real life fishing variables such as the way carp exploit various natural food sources as the season progresses and this will impact on bait design and bait recipes, type of baits used and how they are applied on the hook and introduced as ground bait. When fish are very much orientated to feed upon natural organisms then this too can be exploited by good bait design, and we can exploit and manipulate the presence of natural organisms by using our bait to deliberately attract these too.

When I began carp fishing in the 1970s a couple of cans of luncheon meat or sweetcorn, or a pound of homemade boilies, ground bait, paste bait or a pint of maggots or a loaf of bread would have been easily enough bait for a successful 12 hour trip. Now it is easily possible to introduce 1000 boilies upon arrival and get a fish hooked within 10 minutes on some waters. It seems very obvious that the use of more bait (despite far higher stocking levels,) has affected feeding behaviours at certain times of the year especially during the colder months.

In the UK, there was a time a few decades ago when it was estimated that the majority of the fish weighing over twenty pounds existed in relatively few waters located in the North Kent area and having lived there myself, numerous villages there are certainly reminders of many famous carp waters from the 1970's and early 1980's period. Anglers starting carp fishing in the last 10 years certainly have great difficulty imagining just how much harder it was to catch fish of big twenty and upper thirty pounds going back even a couple of decades. Big carp existed in much smaller numbers in the UK and in only a relatively select handful of waters and this is why personal best fish of leading anglers in the 1970's and 1980's were so much smaller than those of today!

Not so long ago the capture of twenty carp of over twenty pounds in a season was a milestone few of even the top anglers had achieved. It is astounding to me today looking back, that you can catch twenty carp of around twenty pounds or over on certain UK waters in just a week or less; and this is very much due to the impact of the highly nutritional free baits applied by carp anglers over recent decades. Correct bait application is a massive edge which simply cannot be underestimated but is often extremely under-rated!

I recall catching 23 carp in 5 days averaging just less than twenty pounds, and topped by a mid-thirty from an Essex reservoir back in 1991. I know this type of result is very possible for anyone utilising good bait application on many UK waters today; especially now our UK carp stocks have grown on so much, especially during the last 20 or so years! If you understand more about bait and its application you can keep catching more when times are hard and also achieve outstanding results far more regularly, but avoid wasting expensive bait too!

I know anglers in Spain, France, and in the States and elsewhere can achieve catches that far exceed those possible in the UK; but still it is the effective suitable application of bait that really is a predominant and vital key factor in such giant fish catches. If you speak to leading anglers in various countries around the world, you discover that detailed bait know-how is one topic that is of crucial importance. Considering that carp are extraordinarily adaptive creatures, it is no surprise that by improving our knowledge of how our baits works and how to adapt and apply them creatively has always kept us ahead...

By Tim Richardson.