You can improve your catches instantly by taking the step of trying new things, trying new combinations of things you may already know work and trying things you do not know work or not. Remember it is the things that carp have never regularly experienced previously that mostly catch those dream catches you hope for, so here's a few perhaps familiar and unfamiliar tricks you might try with your baits to stimulate your catch rate! Soak your baits in a dip; whether meat, nuts or particle baits, pellets, boilies dips and bait soaks work!



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!

Coat your baits in bait dough or paste. This is this best way to fish a base mix paste because all the water soluble goodies get to work to the maximum effect on carp stimulus receptors. You might liquidise or just mash some tinned salmon, sardines, herring or mackerel and add wheat flour or ground-up dog mixers with some hemp or sesame seed oil for example; aim to be different!

If you use readymade baits like boilies and pellets or even prepared particle baits like nuts or seeds or tinned meats, you will get more takes by altering the surface coating. Make it irregular shaped as if other fish have already been chewing at the bait. This helps release the baits intrinsic attractive substances too. Another trick when using boilies is to poke them with a knife point or baiting needle to go deep inside the bait to release attraction - it really works and changes the bait surface into a very unusual and irregular texture too with all its advantages!

Try coating your baits with a dough or paste. This does not have to correspond to the hook bait you use at all; it could be you use a red fish meal boilie coated with a yellow bird food paste mix. Or tiger nut coated in shrimp paste, or luncheon meat coated with aniseed flavoured ground bait based paste.

Making the leap of faith and trying coating pop-up buoyant baits with paste is a very good edge indeed and extremely well proven! The pop-up or semi-buoyant hook bait has no need to be like the paste around it and in fact the more alternative your paste is the better. Coating pop-up baits with paste is a great edge which is little-used by the majority of carp anglers and as you can see, these things just take a little lateral thinking utilising what we are already using.

You can add cork granules and other very light or buoyant ingredients to make it float or hang in the water off the bottom or silt or weed for instance. Imagine the advantage of using a buoyant paste around a bottom bait or semi-buoyant bait and how frequently your fish will have had to deal with this! Using buoyant paste around bottom sinking hook baits can seriously save you blank sessions!

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.