How your bait can really make a big difference to your catches in hidden and very obvious ways!

Scientific tests on carp feeding and nutrition often involve protein-rich foods based on casein and gelatine, but you have to ask how many of these tests involve bloodworm, zooplankton, algae, mussels, snails, all forms of insect larvae and aquatic weeds fish etc that fish thrive on. Such natural food items are easily detected by carp due to evolutionary adaptation through millennia and carp can derive maximum nutrition from these foods and digest them very efficiently indeed, and we can exploit all this in our bait use and design! We can certainly improve our catches by exploiting not only the nutritional impacts of natural food items and their profiles of stimulating substances, but by how we apply our baits and manipulate natural carp feeding behaviours also!

When most carp anglers think about baits they most frequently think about flavours, protein or other nutritional aspects, but very many miss all the other aspects of bait that induce carp feeding behaviour and curiosity etc, in general. One important variable factor in our fisheries is the changing levels of the abundance of natural food items present which can impact upon catches on baits very much at certain times and we can exploit this to make catches easier with more focus on ground bait and bait design. It can be tough to induce natural feeding carp to eat our baits unless we truly exploit the biochemical systems and other senses which carp use to detect their natural food so effectively.

When I began carp fishing in the 1970s a couple of cans of luncheon meat or sweetcorn, or a pound of homemade boilies, ground bait, paste bait or a pint of maggots or a loaf of bread would have been easily enough bait for a successful 12 hour trip. Now it is easily possible to introduce 1000 boilies upon arrival and get a fish hooked within 10 minutes on some waters. It seems very obvious that the use of more bait (despite far higher stocking levels,) has affected feeding behaviours at certain times of the year especially during the colder months.

When I look back to the 1970's and 1980's, often carp catches composed of single and double figure fish because much of the time was spent fishing waters that had yet to grow fish to over twenty or thirty pounds. It seems mad that today on the right waters, you can pretty easily catch perhaps 5 twenty pound fish in a day plus many other big double figure carp, when 25 years ago such a catch would be the total for a successful season on the vast majority of UK waters! Because bigger carp simply did not exist in anywhere near the huge numbers and exceptionally bigger sizes found in UK waters today, it is very difficult for those newer to carp fishing today to imagine just how incredibly hard carp fishing used to be in the UK.

Not so long ago the capture of twenty carp of over twenty pounds in a season was a milestone few of even the top anglers had achieved. It is astounding to me today looking back, that you can catch twenty carp of around twenty pounds or over on certain UK waters in just a week or less; and this is very much due to the impact of the highly nutritional free baits applied by carp anglers over recent decades. Correct bait application is a massive edge which simply cannot be underestimated but is often extremely under-rated!

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I just realised it is now 18 years since I had a personal milestone catch of twenty carp whose average weight was just less than twenty pounds, including a mid-thirty pound carp, in just 5 days. My homemade bait recipe design especially, and the way I introduced my free baits, made all the difference in achieving this exceptional catch at that Essex syndicate water back in 1991 and UK carp have had twenty years since to grow fat on the tonnes of bait very many thousands more carp anglers have been introducing to UK carp waters all year round! If you consider that carp soon get very conditioned to baits and practice avoiding hook baits in many carp waters 24 hours a day, the significance of knowing that bit more about bait, how it works, and how to apply it in new and creative ways is obviously highly important to consistent success today.

I know anglers in Spain, France, and in the States and elsewhere can achieve catches that far exceed those possible in the UK; but still it is the effective suitable application of bait that really is a predominant and vital key factor in such giant fish catches. If you speak to leading anglers in various countries around the world, you discover that detailed bait know-how is one topic that is of crucial importance. Considering that carp are extraordinarily adaptive creatures, it is no surprise that by improving our knowledge of how our baits works and how to adapt and apply them creatively has always kept us ahead...

By Tim Richardson.