When you think about it there are many reasons why carp love shrimps – they are natural food for a start but how can you exploit shrimp in ways to present incredibly irresistible levels of naturally concentrated attraction in your homemade and readymade baits – to catch loads more fish?! Read on to find out much more!

When I got into carp baits much more around 1980 shrimp meal was a very popular ingredient. It seems that many people had not figured out the link with krill, or lobster or abalone etc for that matter, but shrimp was all the rage and was used in fish meal based baits mainly. But most of the carp anglers I spoke to about this either had no clue why shrimp was effective or had some kind of vague idea such as it has something to do with what it contains, like pigments, polysaccharides, salts and amino acids and the like. However what these did once inside a fish was certainly not a subject for discussion primarily because hardly anglers really knew. But this aspect of bait is absolutely worth its weight in gold and I have found out very much of this not that I will explain here, but I will provide for readers newer to baits a few useful ideas to boost the performance of their baits!

Belachan is a fermented shrimp paste made in parts of Asia for many culinary applications to massively improve taste and palatability of dishes among other things. This should be no surprise as it is has a high salts content. The CC Moore European product version in powdered form is also available apart from Belachan block. This Belechan style powder is an extremely useful additive indeed for boosting the levels and concentrations of feeding triggers and attractors in your readymade baits and homemade dips and soaks as it is very soluble in a wide range of solutions. Bearing in mind that this is simply one example and all you need to do is think a little to produce baits that your fish will not be very familiar with, all it takes is a little imagination to come up with spicy shrimp pellets and meat baits and boosted hemp, nuts, pulses, crushed seeds and so on – all to great effect I might add!

Obviously making baits using highly soluble additives and ingredients is very stimulating to me because they are very stimulating to fish – and are they are usually easily digested too which in cooler water is especially important of course to maximise the potential of baits for even more bites and fish caught. To make a very simple soft paste recipe you have endless options so this is just one suggestion of a concentrated bait. All you do is mix your Belachan block with boiling water to make a dense slurry and mix this with the milk powder called Vitamealo. It will take quite a volume of Vitamealo to form a stiff paste but believe me it is well worth making and using! Put this paste into a glass of cold water and watch what happens.

This paste is very soluble although less so in colder water but is absolutely ideal for cold spring conditions. If you wish to make your paste more resilient again many options are available. You might mix your Vitamealo with whole egg powder, blood powder, caseins, maize meal, tiger nut flour, semolina, or CLO for example. Stiffened paste with a reasonable level of more insoluble ingredients with egg powder for instance makes effective boilies too although steaming baits instead of boiling them is preferable to maximise their nutritional attraction – intact! Now you know how to impregnate your readymade baits with shrimp and how to make a homemade shrimp boilie why not go for it and find out more?! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information – see my biography right now!

By Tim Richardson.