Homemade Carp Bait

By: Tim Richardson

Carp Bait Design And Making Successful Homemade Baits!

There is always more to exceptional carp bait design for any carp angler to discover whether you are a beginner or not, and the huge benefits of being able to adapt your readymade baits, or homemade ground baits to improve your catches is very much limited only by your knowledge of bait and its innovative applications. Read on for some great practical tips...

Many carp baits are tested on juvenile fish in stew ponds and tank settings and this is pretty pointless to say the least. Such settings may show baits that are actually repellant and the ones that induce a more leisurely or frantic response for whatever period of time. However, these overlook many variables found at a carp fishery in reality where hard pressured fish feed in very cautious ways indeed. Also the dietary requirements of juvenile carp are different to those of larger growing carp.

Fully matured adult fish of 20 or 30 plus years of age which are often the big ones anglers want to target in reality and have different dietary needs to juveniles! Just to prove a point, it is possible to fish some rich waters with boilies and not catch any small fish present below about 6 pounds, but then to use worms, maggots or sweetcorn as bait and suddenly catch numbers of them...

It's always a great idea to test your baits on the actual fish you are wanting to catch and in most fisheries there will be one spot where you can observe fish feeding on baits, whether it is in the margins under an overhanging bush, or between snags or weed beds, over gravel, or just looking down into the water with polarising sunglasses on the right days from a raised viewpoint.

Often individual fish will definitely appear to prefer one or 2 recipes and flavours than others. This is also expressed to a degree by repeat captures of particular fish on the same recipe or flavours repeatedly, while other individuals remain uncaught or are caught perhaps just once on one bait but far more on a different one. I know of one water I caught 9 separate individual forty pound carp where I used a different homemade bait and ground bait each session I visited. Meanwhile a friend kept catching the same fish by using pellets and readymade baits which led to some frustration for him!

Winter time is a period when bait substances which do the job of getting hooks in mouths really matter and it is a great time to perhaps change to far more soluble ones, (for example by using flavours based on highly water soluble glycerol or alcohol.) This is an easy thing when you consider you can part dilute a neat flavour and soak your baits in it or freeze them in it so they draw it inside as the bait as it defrosts. Also you can use a liquid lecithin to improve feeding stimulation and digestion and encourage bait hydration and dispersal of attracters and triggers through the water to draw in stimulated fish to your hook baits.

These days many strains of fish can attain weights over twenty pounds in incredibly short periods of time, not in tanks but from a natural spawning in natural settings where carp fishing feeds and ground baits are plentiful.

I'm sure that fish feeding dynamics of many species in response to fishing baits has altered as well as that of the growth of many natural food items that happen to feed on our baits without us realising... Global warming has obviously changed the length of the growing season in certain ways and it seems that if water temperatures continue to rise that things will get very much harder for other fish than carp to survive that need colder water to spawn successfully!

It is ironical that the two possibly most significant artificially introduced species in the last 30 years into the UK; the carp and wels catfish, potentially have the most potential to seriously dominate rivers and lakes into the future even more than today. This will be due to their broader spawning temperatures regimes and higher rates of growth in relation to temperature rise increments.

Certain other resident UK fish species needing lower water temperatures in which to breed successfully will disappear within 50 years. This is mainly owing to the effects of global warming due to humans predominant refusal to replace non-hydrocarbon and other carbon based fuels for energy right now...

The carp and catfish metabolic criteria for increased growth and reproduction rates in warmer water temperature regimes makes their futures appear far better in rising planet temperatures. (But at the same time, the possibility for disastrous wipe-outs due to imported diseased fish stocks carrying pathogens and parasites of many kinds is a huge risk.)

But carp and catfish large size and ability to out-compete naturally indigenous fish feeding on the same food sources is are advantages that should secure the future of angling for these species so it looks very promising. The potential for many more incredibly large fish is very possible and a world record carp over 100 pounds is now simply a matter of time.

The numbers of carp weighing over forty pounds today in the UK is very significant and it is worth remembering that only in the 1980's a thirty pound carp was considered the ultimate fish of a life-time because there were so few fish of such size available in our waters...

Now for just a quick word about keeping fish weights in perspective. When I began collecting press cuttings to record fish weights and baits they were caught on in the late 1970's, the average carp was mid to upper twenty pounds. A thirty pound fish was simply outstanding and only realistically a target for a handful of carp anglers. Now in 2008 the UK press has consistent reports of big forty pound fish and quite a significant number of fifty pound fish caught from a variety of waters. This is very exciting stuff indeed and I still recall the tremor of excitement in anticipating my first run from the first water I ever fished that contained fish weighing over twenty pounds.

Of course much of your success in terms of the size and weight of fish you catch depends upon your access to waters that hold the fish you desire. I still recommend anyone who is learning carp fishing to fish a range of waters; most of which will have plenty of fish in the upper double and lower to middle twenty pound range. If you can seriously bag-up on such waters very consistently then this will be one sign you will be able to handle more difficult waters having learnt a degree about fish behaviours and application of fishing rig and tackle techniques and the efficient and innovative application of bait.

I truly believe that it will be a much better thing when the condition and health of our fish become the priority as opposed to weights per se. In my own experience I got to a point where the weights were not the main thing at all, but how the fish were caught that mattered far more in terms of satisfaction.

In one letter I received from an international bait company boss back in the 1980's it was stated that not all the bigger fish are necessarily the hardest to catch. This really opened my eyes the more I thought about it... (Many smaller but perhaps much older carp are very rarely caught - if at all!) This is also something to for you to ponder on if you are looking for a really serious challenge...

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