If you are one of the thousands of carp anglers who are turning to making their own homemade baits or are considering it in order to be able to go fishing without unaffordable bait costs, you are in luck! Here is a very revealing article to seriously set you on your way to big fish with massive savings for years to come!

Traditionally carp anglers have used boilies as a way to defeat the attentions of smaller fish because these baits do not in general get whittles away or pulled off the hook or rig very easily unlike paste baits. Boilies can be made for very many functions to suit fishing situations and methods of fishing, from soft and soluble heavy ones to very hard and buoyant ones that can be fished in critically-balanced ways, or mid water or on the surface and so on.

Boiled baits are a more resilient progression of what used to be called specials or carp baits that were pretty much a more customised version of bread or wheat flour paste or dough type baits. Modern carp fishing boilies are often not very different in terms of recipes and ingredients from baits made even as far back as the Sixties.

The advent of the huge upsurge in the promotion and production of soluble fish proteins and their increased availability around the early Seventies and onwards has certainly had a big impact in terms of the success of many carp baits and pellets too for example. The newer generation of predigested fish meal containing boilies and products like marine or halibut pellets containing high levels of these products plus high quality oils and other factors has meant such baits have made quite an impression on catches of carp and catfish and other species too.

Going back in time a few decades, using trout pellet boilies and paste were often almost the normal thing to use on many carp waters in various versions and were certainly very successful, so these things are far from new today. We could begin with a high carbohydrate bait based on ground cereals and flavours but as one of the big advantages of protein baits is their natural nutritional attraction compared to most carbohydrate baits a description of how to make a pellet powder ingredients bait follows:

It is very easy for a beginner to make a homemade bait from ground trout pellet or ground marine halibut pellet powder far more appropriately, using proprietary ground carp pellet powder! Carp pellets are far more ethical as these are actually designed to suit carp dietary essential requirements specifically as opposed to pellets meant for other fish groups such as the salmonids (trout, salmon etc) with different energy and other aspects of essential requirements.

Note; just because a bait catches fish does not mean it is harmless and will not lead to fish damage and diseases in the long run. Fatty liver diseases in carp due to over use of high oil pellets and boilies is a blight on UK big fish angling and I cannot bear to land big carp even over forty pounds with ruddy great livers protruding out of the side of their abdomens where the diet of baits supplied by anglers themselves is leading to these often fatal conditions!

Think about high oil pellets like MacDonalds or crisps and chocolates eaten by many obese people. You can see the fat outside, and sure you see many fat bellied carp that often barely fight when hooked, but imagine how much fat is around the organs and in the tissues of fish fed unhealthy baits 24 hours a day every day week in week out for years; it is not good and leads to completely unnecessary fish fatalities!

I have also found that use of carp pellet type baits out-fish baits based on the vast majority of salmonids pellets in cool water temperatures too. This is very much due to the low oil content of carp pellets. The bulk oils in halibut pellets for instance certainly mess up the digestion rate of carp when temperatures drop and I am still amazed when you see the high oil trout and salmon and halibut pellets being offered or in use in winter; I guess it just shows some angler do not want to catch so many fish!

If you visit carpfishingpellets on the web you will find a whole range of specialist carp pellets and koi feeds for all kinds of stages of growth and different times of year and containing various different formulations and ingredients and additives to suit every fishing situation. You can order these in whole form or in ground form and I consider these products some of the most instant carp catchers for lazy carp bait makers imaginable! They contain the essential nutritional stimulation and attraction needed for reliable short and long-term baits and can be boosted or adapted in multitudes of ways to enhance bait performance.

This past winter I used a winter formulation of koi pellet as an experiment. To this I added binders in the form of very cheap maize and wheat flours just to enable baits to rolled but this is not totally necessary as often pellets contain enough cereal binders that they roll into baits anyway especially when eggs and a little hemp oil for instance is added to smooth the baits in this process.

I named this range of my experimental boilie recipes Borg Cubes from an episode of an old Star Trek episode – I never did get why it was such a cult but the name of this craft made me laugh! With these carp pellets based homemade baits I made the great percentage by rolling prepared dough out and just cutting it with a bread knife into cubes (which takes just a few minutes for kilograms of baits!)

I made my free baits square. My hook baits were made into uneven rectangles (which wobble in the mouth.) Used using these baits in practice carp obviously find these a real challenge when attempting to eject such baits. This is in great contrast to uniformly round, dumbbell or more rounded cylinder or pellet shaped baits. In fact such baits are a big thing of mine!

Bait secrets may seem to all be known right? But this is simply not the case! For instance I am mad keen about making new connections between disparate aspects of life and between all kinds of things that at first sight may first appear completely irrelevant to each other. My own inspiration for making cube baits was not simply to be different and achieve a competitive edge by simply this.

The secret is to solve answers to challenges carp behaviours present us with. In this case it is obvious from my own experiences and first hand observations of carp behaviours that they have evolved incredible skill at avoiding and ejecting hook baits even when fairly well hooked but most of all in spitting out rounded baits most of all. This is because they have had years to develop these skills and most of the big old wary carp which we dream of catching are too many individual degrees masters or masters in the making in these skills. The fact is that irregular angular baits create totally different pressures that carp find much harder to deal with than with more uniformly rounded baits. For more information see my readymade improvement and homemade bait making secrets site link and biography now!

By Tim Richardson.