These days saving money on fishing is very important and anything you can do to get better results for less money is worth doing and making your own unique homemade fishing baits is a fantastic example and need take very minimal time! There are a few basics to know about making baits and once you have these you can go ahead and make very unique and successful baits economically for the rest of your life. Making your own baits will save you're a shocking amount of money and not just in the long-term; so imagine what else you could be spending your hard-earned money on instead!

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.

It may be no surprise that both humans and carp have evolved in part due to the energy providing foods available for us to exploit in our environments. We can exploit how these foods are detected by smell and taste for example, by boosting the levels of the most highly stimulating substances within our baits. These may consist of natural food sources of soluble amino acids, flavors or even using specialist hormone preparations etc, but there are thousands to choose from!

In fish experiments the essential amino acid requirement of very few fish has been established, but those of carp are known and can be exploited in our baits to good effect. But you do not need to know how to create a balanced profile or high protein bait to catch fish. It does help to use protein foods like hens eggs, fish meals, caseins etc which are high protein sources, because they provide many essential amino acids and are extremely well proven bait ingredients.

In the UK many fishermen have the attitude that carp baits not made from very expensive protein ingredients are crap baits and catch few big fish, but the truth is that you can catch as many fish on carbohydrate based baits if you know what you are doing and have enough experience of other ingredients and how to fish such baits well and save yourself a fortune, which is what I have done successfully for decades. You just keep adjusting levels and types of stimulatory and attractive substances to create new baits regularly, so keeping ahead of the fish; and many big fish often fall to new unfamiliar baits with good reason...

So many carp fisheries are over-stocked that the fish need to eat your bait and treat it as natural food. As many carp anglers know well, possibly the greatest edge is to be different and so you can fish with confidence against any well-used readymade commercial bait knowing your unique bait has a great edge of being different and unique. This is one great motivator for me to make my own extremely economical and productive homemade carp baits rather than spend 10 pounds or 20 Dollars on a bag of readymade bait that others are already using!

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.