Catch More Fish By Improving Your Bait

Not catching many fish? Are you catching, or just fishing? There is a big difference! You can increase your catches by trying new things, trying combinations of things you already know work and trying things you know nothing about. Remember it is the things that carp have never regularly been exposed to that will help catch those dream catches you pray for regularly. Here’s a few tips and tricks with which you may be familiar or not. You might try these with your baits and boost your catch rate! If you soak your baits in a dip; whether meat, nuts or particle baits, pellets, boilies dips, bait soaks work!

Some of the dips that work are the oil rich dips and those rich in amino acids. These are outstanding and can come from simple homemade sources like tinned tuna oil mixed with liver pate and garlic salt. Maybe you could try shrimp paste with diluted fruit cordial juice and yeast extract; you don’t have to spend a fortune on ready made dips or soaks etc. Don’t boil your hook baits; instead, steam them to allow far more nutritional attraction and stimulation to release into the water.

Dough or paste is great when used as a coating around other kinds of hook baits. With paste you know there is no barrier from boiled protein as there is with conventional boilies that prevent most of your bait attraction from reaching the fish to trick them into feeding! Other items around the kitchen to use are tinned salmon, tuna, herring, mackerel, anchovies and pilchards. All of these can be made into paste by adding eggs and wheat flour to bind; it’s simple but works!

Many anglers under use their ready made baits because they have a relatively impervious surface. You can break this surface with a baiting needle, or sharp pointed knife or scissors to get more attraction out of your bait. Making your hook baits irregular shapes with irregular surfaces helps by making fish think your bait has already been chewed on by other fish and thus is safer.
Have you ever tried coating your free baits with paste as you do with your hook baits. You could try fishing a red fish meal hook bait with a pink liver paste or a meat based bait with a fish based paste; experiment with colours, flavors and other kinds of baits together! Coating particle baits like smaller pellets or tiger nuts with paste is worth doing!

Make a leap of faith and try coating pop-up buoyant baits with paste resulting in a very good edge and is extremely well proven! The pop-up or semi-buoyant hook bait does not have to be like the paste around it and in fact the more alternative your paste is the better. Coating pop-up baits with paste gives you an edge over the majority of carp anglers and as you can see, these things just take a little lateral thinking utilizing what we are already using.

You can add many ingredients to a paste or dough and make it buoyant or float. Cork dust or granules are one example of this. Fish can be fooled into taking buoyant baits because they counter-act the weight of the hook and rig material among other beneficial effects. I’ve caught many big fish by using this approach but using buoyant paste hook bait wraps and often fish will take this bait rather quickly.

It is a commonly held angling myth that fish do not learn, but actually many species can be conditioned by angling activities, bait introduction etc. Even koi carp can be trained to take baits from out of a keepers hands. They can be trained to be in a particular place in advance of feeding time! If you think carp do not learn just consider that over time, 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 maximize the impact and effects of your hook baits and free baits. After all, a trap is only as good as the bait!

Good luck and good fishing!