Tag Archives: Magazines

Fishing Tips

Carp Fishing Bait And Tackle Secrets Of Success!

Many anglers mistakenly think that all they need to succeed is a bag of readymade baits and a few thousand pounds worth of new gear. But did it ever strike them that actually the most well known anglers of the last 50 years certainly did not always use readymade baits or the latest most fashionable carp gear – because such things are only relatively new innovations! Read on now for genuinely new edges and tips you will not find in any magazines!

Carp fishing arguably got more popular in the early eighties when many more individuals and companies saw that carp fishing could become a big business. In the nineties when carp magazines became more of a force of influence other than the voice of experienced anglers on the bank, the commercialisation of carp fishing really got moving. Unfortunately many of the carp magazines appear to be more interested in making money and selling products than offering readers open-minded opinions free of commercial bias but it appears that running magazines requires guaranteed regular advertising revenues in order to survive. I must admit I preferred the days when guys wrote books and articles that were not blatant promotional vehicles for companys products!

All this has gradually happened at a steadily growing rate of change that has seen once peaceful lakes today resemble bivvy cities. The enormous commercialisation of carp fishing has been going on for some years but I consider the real start of the cult of carp fishing explosion was around the early nineties when the magazines popularity really began to grow and influence anglers mindsets.

Cliff Fox founder of Fox International now one of the biggest tackle companies was running a different kind of engineering business before he really got a name for mainstream carp fishing tackle and if I remember correctly he was into providing things like custom-made shelving for businesses and so on. However it seems he always had an urge to design fishing-related items and I know he liked using gadgets such as 2 way radios such as when he fished certain lakes in Essex. Even in his much earlier days he was selling things like his old-fashioned style of metal bait dropper for instance.

I noticed a distinct change in his tackle preferences when he joined the Savay syndicate when long-range tactics were essential and his rods and reels suddenly resembled pretty much in the early nineties what have become the normal for most carp anglers today. In the eighties one of my fellow syndicate members designed a zero-friction style of bite indicator and this was field-tested on the water. I was one of the lucky few to use these brand new swinger indicators before they became a world-wide phenomenon and initially we really mainly used them to find fish by refining their setting to most easily indicate line bites which was something that monkey-climber-type bite indicators were less effective at doing.

I invented a rear rod butt clip by using the plasticised rubber of an old style heavy duty hose pipe and it is no coincidence that Fox brought out the foam rubber and metal adjustable rear rod rest ideal for clamping your rod solidly in position when fishing in snags and hit and holding and so on. In the early days on the syndicate I used to tie my rod butts to my rear rests using a simple thick string loop that when passed from one side of the rest to the other the rod formed an angle that meant the string stayed in place until manually lifted off by hand immediately when a run occurred. You might think that stretchy or elastic type rigs are new but we were using such rigs and indicators for that matter back in the early eighties or before that time.

It amazes me how many anglers now use the plastic coated braids and other materials of hook links, where once very few anglers thought of including hinges and loops in their rigs. Of course stiffness in a rig is an advantage in hooking fish and loops can help prevent hooked fish slipping of hooks for instance. The old Amnesia type rigs are still in use and the memory of certain materials makes them ideal for producing curved springy type rigs perfectly angled for maximum penetration. I still really like using multi-stranded hook links and I remember having to buy my first batch by mail order in the very early days when Kryston was far from the multi-million pound turnover business it is today.

Believe it or not the original multi-strand product I used was 60 pound strength – and I initially trialled it as hook link material at that strength in the maximum thickness – and caught very good fish in the upper twenty pound bracket on this material right from the first cast! The fact is that multi-strand totally flattens and spreads out when compressed by carp lips when carp are testing for lines connected to baits and this is just on of the many unusual advantages of this material.

Inevitably I obviously split my 60-pound hook link material into 3 lengths to make the material go much further as it was quite expensive and using it at 20-pound strength and thickness was ideal. I found it best to make thumb knots in it about every 2 inches, leaving the last 3 inches able to spread out next to the hook. Use with PVA products this hook link material is I believe as good as invisible as is possible when presented correctly with practice – unlike so many hook links that will never disappear, flatten out or absorb light to a sufficient degree to be totally natural!

Many lines and plastic hook links even reflect light – like the vast majority of hooks; this is madness considering how acute the short-range eyesight of carp has been proven to be! Some of those so-called expert names in magazines have even written articles on rigs that included silver hooks – talk about misguiding the masses!

Of course in the eighties we used PVA tubes, PVA string and spodding and method type ground baits although the cult status of such products was yet to come about probably because those of us who used such edges then mainly kept quiet about them – but there are plenty of other secret edges yet to be exposed in the magazines or elsewhere!

I will finish with a tip about bait. Years ago we used to make liquid bait soaks by boiling down the whispered-about potent additive Belachan fermented shrimp block and adding all kinds of weird and wonderful substances, some of which are still under wraps today. One impact that Belachan in solid or in solution has is highly significant enhancement properties within baits of all kinds. Belachan has a significantly high mineral content that is highly attractive in its own right and this obviously enhances the amino acids, various acids and other compounds that Belachan offers that are so stimulatory to fish.

Today many bait companies offer Belachan in liquid form, often at inflated prices – so why not make your own homemade bait edges instead – in far more naturally concentrated forms? I do not recommend you use the enhancer MSG (monosodium glutamate) because it over-hydrates brain cells at the brain receptor site causing bleeding on the brain – please pass this on! Other very good enhancing liquids include L030 and liquid yeast – these examples and more are very rich in natural glutamate! These will certainly multiply your catch rate if you fully maximise them and impregnate your baits with them to a far greater degree than almost all readymade baits available today!

In fact I have found it easily possible to make homemade baits packed with liquid nutritional attraction that have proven to last functionally intact in water for at least 21 and more hours, that contain no egg binder and have no need of cooking whatsoever! The competitive advantages of these homemade baits are huge (all it takes is to keep an ever open mind and a willingness to think for yourself instead being hypnotised into becoming a mindless consumer!)

Such unusual baits contain far higher levels of liquid foods and natural enhancers, and natural feeding stimulators and attractors and as such are far more potent to fish than any readymade boiled, steamed or heated boilies or pellets. If you fish maggot-dominated lakes such as the Sandhurst Lake why follow the herd? Sure when so many maggots are entering the water carp receptors can get adapted to becoming very much more sensitised to their excretions but guess what – it does not mean you have to stop using boilies at all unlike anglers such as Ian Chillcott and Gareth Fareham might imply! No disrespect intended to them but to be frank I do not regard them as scientific experts on bait or fish – so why swallow every word they say? They are good anglers because they are willing to be adaptable – but you too can be equally if not even more adaptable and successful! (Note too that many great anglers do not publicise themselves at all!)

Think about it; exploiting liquidised maggots as the liquid protein and ammonia source in your boilies, pellets and ground baits is going to really make a difference if you use very soluble bait designs. With the right information these are totally unique baits you can easily make at home for yourself – to keep ahead of your fish and competing anglers! (For further information on making, adapting, designing and boosting your baits see my bait secrets ebooks website Baitbigfish right now – and improve your catches for life!)

By Tim Richardson.

Now why not seize this moment to improve your catches for life with these unique fishing bibles: “BIG CARP FLAVOURS FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CARP SENSES EXPLOITATION SECRETS!” “BIG CARP AND CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!” And “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” For these and much more now visit:

http://www.baitbigfish.com

The home of the world-wide proven homemade bait making and readymade bait success secrets bibles and more unique free bait secrets articles by Tim Richardson!

Fishing Strategies

New Homemade Carp Fishing Bait Recipes To Beat Readymade Baits!

Countless anglers want to catch new personal best carp, catfish and barbel using homemade baits. Looking at recent carp magazines and papers you might get the impression that a revolutionary wave of new baits has arrived – but homemade bait makers have been making these forms of baits for decades! So read on, develop your own homemade edges and catch loads more big fish now!

Bait companies market baits very cleverly and often make them appear to be the very latest new thing without this being the case at all! For example, recently a Japanese-designed form of readymade boilie made without additional concentrated flavours so common in such baits has been claimed to be unique. But numerous anglers have been making homemade baits for decades using zero added flavours while exploiting and natural extracts such as marine ones to enhance the impacts of baits both nutritionally and in terms of bait attraction and performance over all. This has included different forms of seaweed products and protein-rich marine products such abalone powder for instance.

Another so-called new innovation is readymade baits that dissolve quickly in your swim so attracting carp without filling them up; but such baits have by definition been the most frequently made homemade baits for a massive range of fish species for centuries – if not millennia! Fibrous pastes that hold together so you can put them on your hook or rig and know they will be resilient are nothing new either. Just one Western prime example is the old medieval Isaac Walton recipe that includes using cotton wool incorporated into sweetened, preserved high protein homemade paste!

So pellet and bait syrups are new things right? Even before the seventies anglers with an ounce of curiosity about experimenting with bait substances have soaked or dipped baits in a massive range of attractive and stimulating materials and liquids. Refiners syrup (Tate and Lyles Golden Syrup) and their liquorice-tasting black syrup have been used in homemade baits in many ways for decades. Even in the late seventies when everyone made their own baits because they had no other option many baits were dipped, glugged, soaked or boosted in some way to improve results.

A very simple example was the instant method of producing extra-stimulating trout pellets. These were coated in flavours, marine extracts, liquid yeast, syrups or liquid sugars and intense sweeteners, essential oils, marine and nut and seed oils, molasses, liquid proteins foods such as Minamino etc decades before such baits became popular as readymade baits in the angling press.

Easily digestible pre-digested boilies suitable for all year round use (even in the lowest temperatures) have been used for decades – well before readymade baits of this type appeared on bait shop shelves or in glossy magazine adverts. In fact when you think about it, the massive majority of commercial bait company bosses of today started out making homemade baits in their kitchens or in their garden sheds and of course many still do although their shed may be much bigger!

Chilli baits and other forms of spicy baits are really old; these go way back in time beyond the days of soaking luncheon meat in curry powder or incorporating spices in special baits in the seventies for instance.

Flavouring fake baits such as foam has been going on since decades ago – I was doing this at the start of the eighties for surface fishing. It also improved results using dog biscuits off the bottom. Spraying maggots with flavours, enhancers, liquid foods etc is old as the hills only liquid foods is a trendy term today – I bet Isaac Walton did not call his high protein rabbit meat baits food baits but they were of course! For me personally, when fake corn appeared flavouring these and other fake baits was second-nature because I had been flavouring foam with all kinds of things since the seventies when it was very useful in stopping soft meat baits from falling off my rig.

In the days before carp fishing became so commercialised you often had to source and design much of your equipment including adapting or making rods, landing nets, bank sticks, indicators, bivvies, homemade foam-padded sun lounger bed chairs and so on. For my early carp fishing rigs before pop-up boilies were used by the masses, I used homemade floater cake propped up for the long term by highly buoyant rubber foam from my dads printing plates – often coated in attractive solvents from the printing trade I might add!

Incidentally I am one of those anglers who cares not for fashions – instead of wafters and expensive tiny pots of pop-up baits a very effective answer to create balanced or trendy in – word wafting presentations is the use of a cut-down piece of liquid food and flavour-soaked rig foam. Rig foam works when flavoured or not but I find it far more effective when it has some residual food or attractor whether this is natural esters or liquid marine extracts etc. Pre-soaked foam used on your hair or hook itself is ideal to for getting loads more bites when using pre-soaked pellets and luncheon meat and prevents soft baits getting pulled off too!

You might think that the concept of using prepared particles that contain a combination of 2 or more types of particle baits such as hemp and sweetcorn is a new thing. But going back decades ago, any general coarse angler who aimed for carp by the evening of a days fishing built up his swim using a combination of all kinds of particle type baits. This would often include any of the following and more: maggots, breadcrumbs, sweetcorn, stewed wheat, stewed pearl barley, fresh homemade pellet-based pastes, chopped worms, soil, soaked crushed egg food, desiccated coconut, peanuts, cracked corn, corn flakes, essential oil soaked luncheon meat, bird foods such as those containing molasses and insects, etc.

Also in the list was the additive Robin Red (which seemed relatively far cheaper in the old days than it is today!) In the eighties using crushed tiger nuts and various pellets soaked in tiger nut extract, powdered palatants and enhancers for example was a great edge for me.

At that time I experimented at home with a mind-blowing array of additives, liquids and associated materials. Fishing over a bed of extremely open- textured unique homemade crushed boilies at a time when most anglers slavishly stuck to a bed of round whole boilies or particles of a single type was just one edge that produced many big fish for me.

Using maggots is far from a new thing for carp. In the early eighties it was common to get great catches by fishing any kind of semi-buoyant low density bait over a bed of maggots. I remember flavouring my maggots with Scopex and Chocolate Malt and dying my maggots and sweetcorn black in the eighties – to great effect!

Liquid Robin Red is far from a new thing either. I loved using this stuff as part of my own unique homemade flavouring and liquid food combinations since the seventies. Originally I was soaking Robin Red with Minamino to try and make the Minamino flavour different when I used it in my homemade boilies, baits soaks, ground bait liquids and so on. It was a small step to heat this liquid to make it far more concentrated. I then got onto the liquid Robin Red that Rod Hutchinson supplied for a period of time – I have no idea why this product was discontinued because it was really was great stuff!

I can tell you that on many waters where the Robin Red liquid of today will be used you will soon do better by adapting it to make it unique after it has hooked enough fish and when they have inevitably become much warier of it! A simple addition of an essential oil, a new seed, an oleoresin or terpenoid type product or an extra spice and unusual sweetener for example will give it new life again – I love all this creative stuff and my bait secrets ebooks are stuffed with such detailed edges!

If you think that pineapple baits with butyric acid are new – think again; this trick was going on long before I started carp fishing in the mid-seventies and then it was used all year not just as a special winter trick. If you want some tips on making better ground baits and more effective stick mixes for instance, get to know a few guys from the States who competitively fish pay-lakes where no ground-baiting or chumming is permitted – many of these guys are real experts and some have literally multiple generations of experience in making these baits!

If you must use fresh boilies try cutting them down for hook baits so all the outer skin is taken off and so you have square baits of about 8 or 10 millimetres in diameter, then soak them in your special dip for a few hours – 3 hours to 5 hours is fine. Use a number of these on a hair with dip-soaked foam on the end of them at the bait stop to pop-up the end of the string of baits.

A tip to finish up this piece – if you want a different bait dip to almost anyone else – for your fake baits, pellets or boilies, either use the juice from ready-prepared hemp or from hemp that you have prepared for yourself. Add about 10 percent liquid inclusion of high PC liquid lecithin (which is an energy-rich feeding trigger proven by one of the more famous fish scientists by the name of Harada!) I might also suggest adding a 10 percent addition of pure triple-filtered salmon oil in your baits too – especially for warmer water baits and through into the autumn time. I get these liquid additives from Phil at Carpfishingpellets online.

Why not try soaking your boilies in this alternative combination so that your baits are fully hydrated in advance of fishing. Why not try fishing them on your rig using a trimmed disc of rig foam to stop them coming off. Put a baiting needle through your baits a few times and fish not whole baits but jagged thirds or halves cut very roughly so it seems that they have already been attacked by smaller fish – and see how the bigger wary carp respond! (For further information on making, adapting, designing and boosting your baits see my bait secrets ebooks website in my biography right now!)

By Tim Richardson.

Now why not seize this moment to improve your catches for life with these unique fishing bibles: “BIG CARP FLAVOURS FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CARP SENSES EXPLOITATION SECRETS!” “BIG CARP AND CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!” And “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” For these and much more now visit: http://www.baitbigfish.com the home of the world-wide proven homemade bait making and readymade bait success secrets bibles!