Tag Archives: flavours

Carp Fishing Basics

HOW TO MAKE CARP AND CATFISH BAITS Using Bait Flavours That Catch More fish!

If you are looking for easy ways to improve your catches then flavours and their creative uses really need to be explored further – but flavours are far more than just smells, tastes or labels but a whole world of different irresistible factors when used in combination in readymade or homemade baits! To maximise flavours to catch many more fish read on now!

 

If you think that flavours are nothing more than a smell they have really come a very long way and are incredibly diverse in effect, quality and fish-catching properties. Many flavours contain bioactive compounds, essential oils and their components plus other factors including metabolic stimulants of various kinds, and many other things besides that turn fish on in multiple ways on different levels. Some flavours attract fish to the proximity of your bait and other substances in your baits should ideally trigger strong reliable instinctive feeding responses. (Natural feeding triggers are a huge part of CC Moore bait design for instance like so many bait companies large and small.)

 

Not at all things about flavours used in modern carp fishing are anything to do with what we in human terms call smell or taste! Specifically-designed and carefully scientifically chosen fishing bait flavours offer many varied effects and impacts on fish these days; far more than the old fashioned solvent-based cake flavours for instance!

 

Solvent based flavours improve bait solubility. For instance glycerol and alcohol based flavours are hygroscopic which means they attract water into your bait. This produces a diffusion effect so that flavour and dissolved bait substances pump out of your bait – so increasing the performance of your bait, and hydrating it more making it more digestible than drier un-hydrated baits yet to become water-packed.

 

Solvent based flavours also act to a great degree as solvents, although water is the greatest solvent of course, many flavours can to a degree help emulsify ingredients, additives, liquids and other elements of your baits so they pass out of your bait and into the water column more efficiently –and even help make your baits that bit more digestible.

 

In one carp magazine a couple of years ago someone used a headline stating to the effect that flavours do not work! Some people have even said that flavours sell more anglers than catch fish. Flavours do more than just attract, or incite or even repel in some cases! Flavours do so much more in a bait when used in combination with many bait ingredients, extracts, liquids and so forth. They are like amino acids and enhancers – they can add to, enhance and multiply the effects and impacts of all kinds of factors in baits as a whole!

 

To simply test a neat flavour in any concentration or pH of water in a tank of clean water using usually juvenile carp is extremely misleading – with endless variables not covered at all.

 

To state that in a range of tests that a certain flavour did nor stimulate feeding does not mean at all that that flavour cannot make a very big difference in a bait. Flavours are about so much more than triggering feeding. They can illicit a change in the behavioural modes of fish even if that happens to produce curiosity and stopping the fish from just carrying on doing whatever (as if your bait were not there at all!)

 

It’s just the same when testing amino acid combinations in different pH water, different temperatures and so on in a tank. Think about it; natural lake water is alive with all kinds of micro-organisms, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and suspended particles and minerals and so on.

 

When you realise how extremely powerful fish senses really are in comparison to humans you tend to consider that almost anything, even inert plastic and rubber baits carry some kind of signal no matter how insignificant. Each and every ingredient and liquid in a bait has flavours even on the extremely finite scale so think about it! Carp can detect certain molecules in water down to as little as one part in a billion. In that way they are like sharks that are well known to detect just one drop of blood a mile or more away down current!

 

I say down current because one of greatest effects of flavours is to not only disperse quickly themselves in the water column, but also crucially assist the dispersal of other bait materials in solution, in suspension and so on which make it far easier and quicker for fish to detect your baits and get hooked faster!

 

I’m not electrochemist or whatever but I do know that baits are very much about the passage of charged particles impacting upon variously evolved receptors, proteins, signalling pathways and brain receptors and so on. This leads to amino acid and hormone releases that directly cause changes in behaviour in us – and in fish. It’s like the old Bisto gravy advert where once you get a whiff of it carried in the air you instinctively want to follow the source – or in the case of fish, the concentration gradient of that signal in the water, issuing forth from your baits!

 

Many many tricks and tips and sound scientific facts can improve your catches when it comes to flavours. For instance cutting a successful flavour with maybe another, or a liquid food, or sweetener or enhancers etc to give a bait a new signal when fish maybe are wising up but still want the nutrition within your bait’s base mix. You can make your own flavour recipes very easily if you have the know-how. I find the ripening processes of fruit and flavour developments in meats, fermented fish, and cheeses and so on fascinating – and very useful and effective when applied to homemade bait making!

 

You might cut a concentrated flavour with a liquid food, or syrup or sweetener, enhancer, natural soluble extract, oils plus a high potency high PC liquid emulsifier, and so on to boost effects and impacts on fish to make them even easier to catch! You can also do the opposite; i.e. cut a flavour so it is less recognisable and produce something new to get around carp wary of familiar over-used flavours.

 

One trick anyone can do is cut one solvent based flavour with others so for example you might make your own pineapple flavour using 3 different brands of pineapple flavour or Scopex flavour or chocolate malt flavour for example.

 

You might source some of your own special flavours that are not on familiar solvent bases at all but are natural – and use these to mix with natural ester based flavours and perhaps an unusual solvent based flavour. Many flavours are natural extracts in an alcohol base, but you can easily make your own unique homemade versions with a little thought! My ebooks are filled with this stuff.

 

I’m not against soaking baits in neat flavours and other substances. You might think this will put fish off. But it’s all about context. Think about it. If you are fishing for many days, you can certainly put flavour-soaked free baits out to alert fish of their presence- very strongly! Then you can be crafty and not fish that area for a number of days, knowing that a good number of wary fish will creep back onto your baits when they have washed out and appear safe. This is the kind of thing I and countless others have been known to exploit.

 

You might consider that you can make extremely potent natural flavours with no solvent bases whatsoever. So many powdered ingredients and additives etc are soluble. But soluble does not just mean in water, but in a variety of other substances. For instance, you might make unusual flavours based on condensed milk totally packed full of added soluble milk fractions and extracts.

 

Another example could be hydrolysed casein liquid with liquid yeast concentrate with added enzyme-treated yeast and intense sweetener with liquid glucose and malt extract. You might want to use pre-digested fish, oleoresins, liquid lecithin, terpenes, Manuka honey and Talin.

 

You can even make baits that are flavoured with a weak flavour mixed with Molasses and Minamino for instance or anything – maybe fresh liquidised crab or crab paste plus a crab flavour for instance, or real liquidised pineapple plus a pineapple flavour and liquid betaine for instance. I class betaine as a flavour, just like glycerine and honey or Marmite or Belachan in warm water in solution for instance.

 

On easier waters using flavour-soaked hook baits and free baits can significantly improve your catch rate. Think about it. Why do hook baits over-dosed with concentrated flavours at 1000 to 1 concentration or whatever incite fish to snap at baits or suck in baits; even going beyond the point of having their receptors in their lips burnt and resulting in hooked fish?

 

Concentrated flavours solvent-based flavours are extremely complex in not just their components but the entire diversity of their designs, properties and impacts on tastes and perceptions. Even if you sampled 10 different brands of pineapple or Scopex or strawberry you would find at least one or 2 that stand out from the rest. Flavours really are a matter of experimentation.

 

If you doubt this and just want to stick to the big brand names and labels that you have heard of previously then consider this; the big companies are not the only ones who use the services of professional flavorists and scientists in various fields to produce fishing bait flavours and additives and so on that are extremely potent in their effects. Many of the products from really small companies can be very advanced indeed and I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending them for your own testing.

 

It is very easy to test flavours. Just one way which is not very scientific but will show you instantly what works on any individual water is to soak your hook baits in 3 different brands of a flavour with the same name, such as banana, blue cheese, condensed milk or whatever, and fish each brand on a different rod for a period long enough to see if one flavour really out-fishes the others, then test the best against more flavours of the same name from different companies until you find an even better flavour. It works because I have done this many times over the years! But the best bit is then you can play with the best flavours you can get even more creative and add effects to them that boost impacts on fish senses and physiology etc even more potently. It takes a bit of reading of my ebooks to put this into practice but literally anyone can do this!

 

You will really benefit from using such variations of many kinds in applications varying from homemade boilies, shelf life and frozen boilies and homemade and readymade pastes, to readymade and homemade particle mixes and preparations, ground bait preparation, spod mixes, pellets, stick mixes, fake baits and even natural baits like CC Moore frozen mussels and bloodworm etc! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information – look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals 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

Proven homemade bait making readymade bait success secrets bibles, unique bait secrets articles by Tim Richardson! FOR FREE VIDEOS SEE:http://www.youtube.com/user/BAITBIGFISH7KAIZEN#p/u/1/eUbFBwq6l9w

Fishing Tips

Making Beginner Carp Fishing Boilies – Cheap Ingredients And Flavours!

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.

For the unique and acclaimed new massive expert bait making / enhancing ‘bibles’ ebooks / books: “BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!” And: “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” (AND “FLAVOUR, FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS”) SEE: http://www.baitbigfish.com Tim Richardson is a homemade carp and catfish bait-maker, and proven big fish angler. His bait making and bait enhancing books / ebooks are even used by members of the British Carp Study Group for reference. See this dedicated bait secrets website now – and improve your catches for life!

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!