New baits are the key to consistently catching big carp because they will be treated with far less caution than any baits they have been hooked on previously! You might favor particle baits like peanuts or tiger nuts, or instant baits high in concentrated flavors or nutritionally stimulating baits. But whatever it is you can be sure that keeping them different to what has been used before is absolutely essential for consistent catches.

Improving your baits competitive edges is all about adapting their ingredients or adding extra ones soaked in, or treating the bait with a new process so it smells and tastes different to its previous version. Other carp can senses come into the equation and be exploited in regards to texture, colour, density, shape, buoyancy, firmness, solubility and permeability etc. However you do it, changing a bait in even one small way can sustain your results on it or even totally transform your results far more positively!

Many baits simply tantalise the fish and evoke a curiosity response rather than provide anything nutritional and many angler get confused thinking that baits absolutely must be an perfect square meal to get takes, but this is completely untrue. Any change you make to a bait can induce a curiosity response from a fish regardless of any other olfaction or other chemoreception stimulation which might be present in the bait. Carp feed using far more senses than merely taste and smell and all can be exploited for improved and prolonged more consistent results!

There is much said about flavors. This probably because they have such vivid impacts upon our senses as most are mainly based upon strongly volatile solvent substances and many taste and smell like foods we recognise; like pineapple, cranberry, banana and strawberry. Changing flavors can easily produce a new bait and renewed results, but synthetic and solvent based flavors are merely a tiny tip of the real flavors iceberg available to us to exploit. Flavor components can do very various things to fish and the water surrounding our baits to induce bites.

The smell and taste of a bait can simply originate from innate flavors in the base mix and most carp anglers forget that even soya flour, semolina, maize meal, wheat flour or rice flour all have unique tastes and smells which even humans can appreciate with our blunted senses compared to acutely sharp carp ones. Once the stronger more highly soluble flavor substances have leached out of a bait you are left with those possibly less concentrated ones which still tempt fish. At this stage you are dependant upon the more nutritional stimulatory substances naturally within your bait ingredients to induce a bite.

Whether you prefer food baits or flavors or even artificial baits like plastic corn or pellets, all can lose effectiveness after repeated captures of fish on any particular water. This is why constantly tweaking or altering your baits in minor or sometimes major ways can extend your catch results on them. The fishing bait industry is all too aware of exploiting this by offering multitudes of new products every year.

When anglers think of carp baits most will immediately picture round boilies. These have succeeded for decades, but its is noticeable that round and now barrel shaped baits are being easily dealt with by wary carp and other new alternative shapes should be exploited! In the case of rubber and plastic baits, their many characteristics and lack of these too compared to conventional carp baits really gives them edges, but even these are not totally devoid of anything carp can associate with danger.

Out of the potential millions of substances you can exploit to make your bait different, new and totally unique consistently over time there are those which have been proven very successful, especially for the bigger fish and many are well known ingredients and flavors offered by bait companies. But there are of course many ingredients and substances not known by the majority of anglers which are either quietly being used by bait companies or not at all and many have yet to be discovered. We can use our own food ingredients as useful guides to what to use to enhance and differentiate our baits to improve results, as we share similar senses and essential needs as fish (albeit in very specific areas.)

Fish and humans share many of the same vital processes and body chemicals we need to survive. A familiar and popular bait additive today is betaine which fish and we use in digestive juices which is also significantly used to remove harmful products in the body. Betaine is one of those substances which is found naturally abundant in nature and which our and fish bodies extract from natural foods for a balanced healthy body. So it makes sense being abundant in our natural foods that our bodies can instinctively senses its need for it and our food detection senses code for this substance strongly.

In fact I focus on betaine because it has an even more intense feeding stimulation impact on carp sensory systems than the fellow feeding stimulator, the amino acid alanine. Most anglers already appreciate the impacts of amino acids upon fish feeding but do not relate this intense feeding response to hardly any other substances. But just in the same way that betaine and amino acids are significant growth and health and balance promoters etc, thousands of other substances have very significant bioactive effects on fish we can exploit in baits for big fish.

The vast diversity of substances that you can exploit and manipulate in our baits and many forms of ground baits etc to induce bite from carp are endless. But to make things clearer I have been able myself to categorise great numbers of these extremely desirable substances, ingredients, flavors etc into groups including their sources, uses and biological effects on carp. This has been extremely valuable but took over a full year to complete. You can do a bit of this yourself next time you read an ingredients list on a can of cola, bar of chocolate, readymade meal, can of beans, microwavable curry, and try and identify the substances which turn your body and senses on and make you want to eat more; it makes you think! The popularity of camp and fishing, boating and hunting and outdoors hobbies for sport and recreation combine well together, but bait is always the deciding factor if you catch fish or not despite all your efforts; so learn as much as you can and transform your catches!

By Tim Richardson.