As so many of you want to make your own secret homemade baits here are some tips for making and exploiting more highly potent baits which will out-fish readymade baits such as Mainline Cell!
1. Most popular readymade boilies which are used by anglers today are a massive compromise of characteristics, features, properties and modes of actions etc which enable bait companies to actually sell baits in the first place and make a profit. But such baits more often than not are designed to appeal to anglers and this is a big problem because it mostly means that such baits are far from optimised for maximum success or even optimum performance regardless of bait company claims in the adverts! So many baits made to appeal to fish are often either not water reactive or receptor reactive enough, or not potent enough in other ways that limit their performance massively. All baits which are heated to make them last longer in water so that anglers have confidence they will still be on a rig when they reel in after fishing for a night are a compromise of many things. None of these baits can truly be classed as optimised for performance. This is where homemade baits and recipes score very highly indeed because you can optimise your own personal baits for optimum performance in every single possible way, including making baits that have zero requirement to be cooked, boiled, steamed or heated in any way.
2. It is very simple to make baits that have as few common characteristics as machine rolled boilies. It absolutely amazes me that anglers today are still stuck in a rut of this dumb paradigm of actually wasting time extruding baits through a bait gun and using a rolling table to from round or barrel or cylinder shaped baits. The most used shapes which spook carp and instantly produce more wary feeding are these shapes! Why on earth would anyone with their brain switched on actually waste their time making homemade baits that replicate the most common characteristics of readymade baits which actually reduce your catches right from the start? Think about all natural carp food items and I think you will discover that perfectly round and cylinder shapes do not figure very highly. Such baits do not replicate natural foods very well at all. Yet compare this to tiger nuts for instance which vary in texture, shape, size and other characteristics that mean it is far more difficult for carp to discern your hook baits among free baits! Apply this thought when making boilies and avoid using bait rollers! I make homemade baits approximately 10 times faster and easier without using a bait gun or rolling table; there are other ways!
3. Why is it that so many anglers coat their hook baits in paste in order to get more bites, or indeed in order to even get a bite? It is very simple for carp to avoid getting hooked on smooth surfaced baits. They have had decades of practice in sorting through millions of round and barrel shaped baits by now. Sure paste changes baits in many ways, but it does not improve boiled bait performance one bit when you cover up a boiled readymade bait with paste. You might as well ditch boilies as a bait format and use paste! I firmly believe that the future is making unheated baits. If you are still turned on by those flashy adverts and even logos of hooks attached to perfectly round or barrel shaped baits it is time to stop thinking like a commercially brainwashed angler and start thinking like a fish!
4. Coupled with bait shape is bait texture. When you stop rolling baits the texture of baits you can produce is absolutely staggering. You can use ingredients that you would never be able to use in bait that is rolled, including for example roughly broken silk worm pupae. Think about it; How many baits do fish experience that have both radically hard and soft areas on their totally uneven bumpy surface and within them inside them with a range of completely differing textures and sensory sensations? The vast majority of readymade baits simply offer a single texture with an even surface texture. Again think about it; why bother chopping up readymade baits with a knife to change their shape or texture? Such baits are not optimised for performance and very obviously flawed in terms of optimum design!
5. Think out of the box; why use a critically balanced bait all the time when it could very well be that because the vast majority of anglers are using them, the fish have simply learnt to deal with most of these kinds of hook baits the majority of the time! Making homemade hook baits that are significantly heavier definitely have their advantages, and when this characteristic is teamed with other deliberate differences to the vast majority of readymade baits you can be certain your fish will find it more difficult to avoid your hook baits. The majority of the time balanced hook baits on stiff or supple or hinged rigs are simply not pricking fish and getting runs but are simply being tipped up or shaken loose, so do something different instead!
6. How many anglers fish baits directly off their leads and fish in the upper layers of the water? I ask this because a great percentage of the time fish do not feed on or near the bottom at all, but are busy filter feeding on incredibly nutritionally rich phytoplankton and zooplankton in upper water layers. Many anglers are still addicted to the thinking that means they fish the bulk of their time waiting for whatever is the conventional feeding times, when fish may be feed on or near to the bottom, characterized by getting bites their. But actually you get far more bites by fish all water layers where fish are situated, and much of the time the majority of anglers simply do not have their baits in the correct water layers. When you can have 8 fish during the day fishing a buoyant bait fished at 20 feet up off your lead in a 40 foot depth of water, while your baits on or near the bottom get no fish surely you must take the big hint that actually fishing off the bottom the majority of the time at least with one of your rods has to be done when no fish are forthcoming! Making homemade buoyant baits which are irregular in shape and even mimic natural food items such as hatching insect larvae is simple when you avoid using bait rolling tables!
7. Strangely far too many anglers using 3 rods seem too anxious to experiment away from their chod rigs. Chod rigs were about in the early eighties, and they are nothing new, just like any of the circle type rigs about today, they are just another method so if you are addicted to using such things because they are in popular favour, why not let go of being a control freak and be far more creative! Using a mixture of bait formats on a rig instead of just one pop up bait is one obvious example; not many anglers consider that just by using a bait made up of 3 layers of different recipe baits they increase the attention of fish by offering 3 different nutritional profiles just for instance.
8. I know very few people who use multiple hairs on their rigs but I can assure you that this approach is brilliant. One reason is that so few actually use this type of rig, but I find in autumn, winter and spring at times when water temperatures are lower this offer massive advantages due to the way fish feed, and the way you can increase the effectiveness of your rigs through exploiting more than one set of baits and bait formats. Indeed in my tests I realised that even if a fish is not triggered by one forms of bait with a particular flavour or amino acid profile, when that bait is only on one hair, and you have a different bait on another hair then you are far more likely to catch when you might not have done. However things go much further than this obvious example, and indeed you can have a maggot extract and worm extract based homemade bait teamed with maggots and worms on different hairs just for example. Such combination rigs work extremely well especially when fishing gets harder, and in colder times in the winter. You can even spray maggots with liquid Tutti Fruitti flavour, or citrus extracts, emulsified essential oils etc.
9. Just one way to beat readymade baits in situations where for instance Mainline Cell is the dominant bait is not to use the proprietary base mix or a copy cat approach at all and instead ignore whatever the dominant bait is totally. In truth a dominant bait is simply an illusion. If anglers were to use worms or duck poop in the right place they will catch fish, and if the majority are doing that then the majority would appear to be catching on worms or duck poop, thus making these the dominant baits. Whatever readymade bait is currently catching the most fish I can assure you that if you make your own highly potent homemade baits and refine them for your water you can out fish any popular readymade bait even without using many kilograms of bait in establishing it! A truly potent bait will catch fish from the very first cast! Potent boilies or pellets etc do not need to have concentrated flavours to be instant baits and in fact my rule of thumb for a great new nutritionally-stimulating homemade bait is that it catches right from the first cast with zero pre-baiting up to condition fish at all. If you are afraid of competing with a dominant readymade bait, then do not. Simply make your homemade baits totally different, and refine them for your water in increments methodically; it is easy!
10. Just so you know, the fastest most instant way to catch fish on a totally new bait recipe, and to establish a new recipe that you want to use on a new water is to use paste baits instead of using baits heated in any way whatsoever! Think hard about the reasons for this and apply them to your bait making as these really can made a massive difference to your catches! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!
By Tim Richardson.