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Monday, December 8, 2008

Improve Your Carp Baits And Catch More Big Summer Fish!

By Tim Richardson

When your catches are not as you wish there are many tricks to try; and improving the pulling-power of your hook baits is just one of these but it is a massively important one! Carp can be very difficult to tempt when previously hooked before on any bait, so aiming to make your hook baits unique can really pay-off. Liquid bait soaks have always been successful but you can make you own homemade ones very easily...

You can make homemade dips using many house-hold food items including oils and juices from tinned fruits and canned fish. Pastes and pastes are very under-used items and mix with various liquids to make effective nutritional cheap dips. It is cheaper to make homemade boilies but steam them instead of boiling them for better catches!

Coating your baits in even simple paste or dough bait certainly increases catches. Because most of the stimuli which incite fish feeding are water soluble, it is sensible to get many soluble attractors in your paste for best effect! There are many feeding triggers in fish and using mashed tinned fish like tuna, anchovy or salmon to make paste to go around your hook baits is easy; just mix with eggs and wheat flour or with ground dog mixers to bind!

Many readymade baits have a surface which does not maximise their fish attraction in the water and it is important to break their surfaces to achieve far more takes. By making a boilies or pellets surface more irregular you can improve attraction leakage from the centre of the bait and fool fish into thinking your bait is safe, having previously been tested by other fish chewing on it! Using sharp scissors, knife or baiting needle you can easily improve the catch potential and attraction of your baits!

The act of putting paste on all your free baits as well as around your hook baits can truly produce great catches; it sounds like hard work but that's why it works; just like in any endeavour! This paste or dough bait covering can be anything and put around anything used as a hook bait; do not be a slave to convention! Even using a Scopex flavoured dough bait around a salmon flavoured boilie is different enough to produce great catches even if it is still a relatively very conventional combination.

You might like to try using paste around buoyant baits like pop-ups. Your hook bait and paste covering do not need to be like each other to produce great catches; in fact far from it! The method of coating a pop-up bait with a very different dough is a huge edge and is very well recommended!

Many big fish can tell which baits are hook baits by their behaviour in the water and their weight and buoyancy. Using a more buoyant hook bait can seriously fool these fish where blank sessions could well occur on mere conventional bottom baits! It might come as a surprise but you can easily make pastes from scalded pellets and other baits too.

It is a commonly held angling myth that fish do not learn, but in truth very many species can be conditioned by angling activities, bait introduction etc and even koi carp can be trained to take baits from out of a keepers hands and be in a particular place in advance of feeding time! If you think carp do not learn just consider that over time when repeatedly hooked by anglers, they do not get easier to catch but harder! It's just the same with hunting of other kinds. For this reason alone it is definitely in your best interests to find out as much as possible how to maximise the impact and effects of your hook baits and free baits because a trap is only as good as the bait!

By Tim Richardson.

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