Saving yourself the cost of expensive bait is one of the most important factors in fishing success for many carp fishermen. It can take quantities of expensive readymade bait to achieve great results and if you have a way of making this very quickly and very cheaply then you can save yourself untold fortunes and catch as many if not more fish than on readymade baits. Once you have a few basic bits of information on making baits you are free to create unique economical baits for big fish for years to come and save yourself a real fortune!
Carp live on mostly protein based foods which contain essential fats and oils which provide most of their energy; in their natural water environment carbohydrate foods are rare. In contrast to humans therefore, carp do not use carbohydrates, but oils and proteins for their energy requirements and process these extrememely efficiently which is not surprising as carp have long evolved to do this. This is why making baits using protein ingredients is more beneficial from a dietary needs of carp perspective and also why protein ingredients and oils are so feed-stimulatory to carp too.
Proteins are composed of amino acids which carp can easily detect and find stimulating; and there are around 10 plus essential ones which carp cannot synthesise in there own body and must consume in their food to survive. The carp essential amino acids list includes: Histidine, leucine, isoleucine, valine, tryptophan, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine and arginine and carp will eat foods and baits containing any of these as they are essential to them. Exploiting protein ingredients in your baits is obviously a good thing as you are offering something fish need to survive.
Our bodies and carp bodies have evolved and adapted to extract energy in the most efficient ways from food found in our natural environments. With carp we can simulate or even boost the natural attraction and stimulation of substances found in their natural foods in our baits. The range of ingredients, extracts, liquid attractors, flavors etc we can use to exploit carp natural food detection senses is phenomenal and ensures we can always make unique homemade baits!
Amino acid needs of carp are important because we can exploit them even in very simple baits to induce better feeding on baits and more bites. But these essential are not absolutely necessary to catch fish on homemade baits; far from it in fact and you can very often catch fish on competitive pressured fisheries on simple carbohydrate wheat and soya type baits which are extremely economical to make! To keep ahead of the fish you might simply just change certain aspects of the bait like attractors such as flavours or even treacles, honey, molasses, cordial syrups, or liqueurs etc.
There seems to be some snobbery in regards to protein based baits compared to using cereal or carbohydrate based baits for example based on wheat or semolina or soya flour. In fact many very economical baits can be made from these ingredients which will just keep catching carp on many fisheries for years. All you need to do to keep catching carp on many waters is to keep changing your attractors regularly as in flavours, various specialist protein extracts, and proprietary fish stimulants and so on.
Often artificially stocked fisheries contain fish which now treat anglers baits as natural food and these fish literally live on them as opposed to just natural food which may or may not be readily available. Homemade baits will catch on the easiest overstocked or richest or under-stocked waters; what do think the early bait pioneers used? Why keep buying readymade bait for 10 pounds when you can produce your own unique baits for a fraction of the cost and very little time or effort when I’ve found over the last 30 years that you can catch against any readymade bait using homemade baits no matter what they are based on!
You might wish to use things like bird foods which can be used both as binders and cheap but nutritional ingredients and just add eggs for example to help bind and can boost your bait protein and nutrition considerably despite carp digestion limiting effects in low temperatures especially. Bait making does not need to be rocket science and the simplest and cheapest of bait recipes catch big fish regularly for decades if fished well. Although carp love proteins for there amino acids particularly, stimulatory and attractive substances are so varied that you will never be short of a new effective homemade bait or alternative potent and unique readymade bait dip; all you need is quality know-how…
By Tim Richardson.
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