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* Your homemade fishing bait’s catch rate can be altered dramatically, by adding even the smallest quantities of especially attractive individual ingredients!* Many natural extracts, concentrated synthetic flavours, or taste enhancers and so on, have the best effects when used in very small doses. Often by adding just a little more ‘for luck’ you can even go too far, and actually make your bait repellant! Going to the opposite extreme, there are many ingredients that you can overload your bait with and just keep getting better and better catch results. I refer here to natural predigested extracts. Examples of these are: Fish protein extract, fermented shrimp, yeast extract, certain squid extracts, etc. The limits of these types of top catching ingredients, are usually cost and their effects on your bait’s practical water solubility rate; before the total breakdown of your bait. Obviously you need a bait to remain resilient long enough to get a bite, whether after 1 hour, or 6 hours etc! Of course there are some commercially produced extracts which need to be used in moderation as they are extremely concentrated, for example, liquid squid extract; dosage instructions need to be followed to avoid making your bait repellant! It is essential to test your bait’s ‘dissolving rate.’ Many ingredients such as predigested extracts, sugars and milk powders can be very soluble have a very high ‘leak-off’ rate. The fish are well attracted by these dissolved substances spreading through the surrounding water. This is so you can gauge how long uneaten bait will last in your ‘swim’ in order to apply the most effective ‘free’ baiting for any bait and fishing situation. Your application of ‘free ground bait’ is one of the most important factors in your carp fishing success! By testing your baits, in a large glass of water, you can time the breakdown stages and maximum ‘practicality’ of your prepared baits, both as ‘free offerings’ and as hook baits, and refine your base mix as required. By regulating bait resilience and leak-off rates, by altering your levels of more, and less soluble ingredients, you can improve your bait’s performance in different ways. Critically, it allows you to ‘differentiate’ your bait from most commercial ‘food value’ baits, by maximizing its rate of breakdown. Commercial bait manufacturers have to meet ‘normal fishing use of the average fisherman, and meet the expectations of the majority of anglers, which may prefer a bait that is resilient enough to last perhaps 24 hours or more before breaking down. ‘Conventional shelf-life baits’ and other ‘preserved’ ones can take a much longer period to break down, and if ignored and uneaten, can take weeks of bacterial activity to ‘digest’ them. Obviously, bacterial enzymes, and smaller fishes attention, can affect the speed at which your baits break down, but you can massively increase the attraction of your bait by exploiting this effect. You can design your free bait and hook baits to maximize the benefits of this, to attract more carp, faster to your swim, and hold them there feeding far more confidently, as long as your bait attractors remain in high enough levels dissolved in the water! I have often wondered about the effects of using different sponges soaked in attractors and fixed near the hook, to test the practical time duration of their attraction benefits. Carp learn ‘by association’, and are ‘educated’ by anglers activities, rigs and baits. In many hard fished waters, carp have ‘associated’ that baits with all flavours leached out, softened, and especially in a state of breakdown, after a period of time in the water, are safe to eat! Therefore, baits with no flavours often catch bonus fish on such waters. I have monopolized on the beneficial effects of very water soluble baits, to very great effect at times! One lake had seen a lot high protein halibut rearing pellets, and the biggest fish had yet to be caught on this abundant food source which the majority of fisherman found fashionable to use at the time. It was at a time, just before ‘Betaine Hydrochloride’ first became known to the average angler in the UK as a carp attractor. I sourced the highest quality predigested fish meal pellet I could, and soaked it in this attractor. I laid out copious amounts of pellet between two thick sheets and shattered them with a heavy hammer tied to a wide, thick piece of wood. Once shattered and soaked, I then used it when fishing. The most important action I took while fishing was, I baited the swim every half hour to an hour, and kept lots of breaking down bait in the swim to create the maximum attraction. Importantly, I used three grades of pellets, each with increasing amounts of soluble fish protein content. The result was, most of the biggest carp and catfish in the lake were caught within days or a few weeks, by using this method, (some repeatedly,) with eleven 30 pound fish and sixty 20 pound fish, one catfish over 50 pounds, and one over 60 pounds. During this time, the average angler was still ‘blanking’ an average of 80 % of the time! I kept what I was doing, ‘low key’, but not a secret. As the fish wised up, and more people began to copy the method, hook holds became less secure, nearer to the outside of the mouths of the ever, more cautious carp. I began scaling down my hook size from 4 to 8, used broken pellet on the hook, and lengthened my hook link from 8 inches to 12. This kept fish coming. I sustained this success by wrapping baits in boiling-water scalded pellet paste, and using this as free baits too. You can design your bait that induces carp to feed confidently, and even feed in an intense, ‘preoccupied’ way. By increasing the soluble ingredient content of your bait, especially with focus on the extremely soluble and digestible ‘predigested’ protein extracts, included in elevated levels. For example, many anglers were getting success by using predigested fish meal pellets. By using a pellet of higher protein content, better quality oil content and consequent attraction, I took control of this further, and designed a similar bait in boilie form. It contained very high levels of a quality predigested fish proteins, tuna meal and milk proteins. This mix was designed and tested until it broke down in a glass of warm water in 4 to 6 hours. (This was a far faster rate than most shop-bought boilies!) I fished a lake which, that year, had only produced a couple of fish up to thirty pounds in 5 months. I fed 20 kilogram of bait into the lake, over a period of 3 weeks; while fishing three times using this bait. At this time I did not even get a single ‘bite!’ Then I fished once more, and water temperatures had risen. I fed in 7 kilograms of bait in total, over timed intervals during that day. The first fish came that night at 32 pounds. Amazingly, this was followed by five more 30 pound carp, one after another. The effort of making the new bait to ‘top’ the one that the majority of other fishermen were using; had paid off handsomely! The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches. (Warning: This article is protected by copyright.) By Tim Richardson. ‘The thinking man’s EXPRT BAIT MAKING GURU.' *** FOR MORE EXPERT FISHING IMPROVEMENT INFORMATION AND BAIT MAKING BOOKS SEE: http://www.baitbigfish.com Tim Richardson is a leading big fish angler with many incredible catches to his name. He is also a nationally recognised carp and catfish bait guru in the UK. His best selling bait making and bait enhancing books / ebooks help beginners and experienced anglers alike to improve and enhance their baits achieving far greater catches of big fish. *His books are even used by members of the elite “British Carp Study Group” for expert reference. * If you feel your catches could gain from more expert bait experience, insights and fishing information and techniques, take a look at Tim’s dedicated website.
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