Making carp baits for big fish of over thirty pounds is a goal that more and more anglers want to achieve, because the rewards really are worth it! You can catch as many if not in fact more big carp by using totally unique homemade baits! There are many possible ingredients for making carp baits, but what you need is a very solid starting point of confidence so the expert information in this article is very helpful indeed!
You need to understand straightway that success is a recipe, but not merely a miracle magic bullet instant success recipe. There is a reason why there are so many carp baits, and that is that carp are constantly evolving in order to avoid threats, and to exploit new opportunities in order to survive to pass their genes on to future generations. So you basically need to make baits which are not a threat, that either literally or superficially represents a huge opportunity for them to exploit and take advantage of, so they feed on your own unique baits! (It takes more that merely having a boilie recipe to achieve this!)
It must be emphasized that bait is merely one part of the formula for success! Fish location, rig choice and rig dynamics, awareness and understanding of angling pressure upon fish, individual angling skill and a positive mental attitude and persistence seriously count also! Consistently always learning and developing further new knowledge and making continuous further refinement of knowledge and skills are all part of the art, craft, and science of successful big carp fishing! There are no short cuts if your aim is to be as consistent as possible in catching big fish; it really is all about constantly learning more and more and adapting and refining every single aspect of your fishing!
As I began making homemade baits back in the 1970’s long before the age of any ready made carp baits, when each and every angler really was literally doing his own thing, I learnt a massive amount about what works, what is very good and what is outstanding! The ready made baits produced by bait companies today are actually predominantly still based upon recipes and the groups of ingredients and additives that pioneering anglers were using as early as the 1950’s and 1960’s!
But as a homemade bait make, you can achieve massive edges by improving as much as possible upon the old fashioned thinking, old fashioned mindsets from bygone eras! You can harness the power of new ingredients and additives, new palatant substances, new bait components, which have only become available perhaps within the last 10 years!
The most significant edge that you have as a homemade bait maker is that you have full control over exactly how you think about your bait design process. This means you can choose exactly what you want to exploit within the entire range of fish senses, and their sensory systems. You genuinely can make your baits really seriously enhanced in every way to be detectable as easily as possible and as active in water as possible, to highlight your baits to fish senses!
Of course there are a number of schools of thought about carp bait design, but you can choose to use an element of one or just ignore another and just focus on one aspect. For example there are many bait companies that basically produce very cheap baits that are mainly carbohydrate bulking ingredients with one significant active component and perhaps a label or flavour, and such baits might be enhanced in just one other way, or maybe a few, perhaps a sweetener or a palatant feed inducing substance for example.
This is really an echo of very basic bait making approaches which are extremely old fashioned now and are a kind of similar mode of thinking to that in the very early days of carp fishing of using something like bread plus honey or bread plus some kind of hung meat which has evolved fermented flavours, or a bait which is literally actively breaking down due to fermentation.
In the early days many baits for carp were simply based upon bread in one form or another, and you might have said in the group mindset of 20 or even 10 years ago that such bread based baits are rubbish because they are low protein. But now of course anglers recognise the value of bread within many carp bait applications, and most recently within stick mixes for example, and no-one can argue with the success of these, and method mixes, carpet ground baits, cereal including wheat and other gluten bound pellets and so on!
So bait has no absolute place or point, but simply a state of evolution. Even if you had an ultimate bait there are considerations about just how much satisfaction such a bait could produce after a while. I mean by that for example, that about 7 years ago I set myself a goal of catching my dream fish but all on homemade baits, and pretty much a string of 15 UK forty pound carp in around 14 sessions. Yet despite this success, I had been so totally focused upon making the ultimate bait, and goal setting, that I actually forgot to truly appreciate how incredible each and every one of those fish, and those captures were!
The first fish of that series were a mirror and a common caught just two hours apart, and the common equaled the old British carp record that Richard Walker held for so many years, and which so massively inspired me. So that first common carp meant so much, particularly as it was not a balanced crust and paste bait that tempted that fish as in walker’s case, but it was a stack of three very precisely constructed very dense and extremely hard very unusually shaped hook baits.
The image of those baits attached to the hook, as I un-hooked that new personal best fish caught on homemade baits is imprinted firmly into my memory! However, the rest of that string of forty pound carp was just a rush, and such a blur, that none of them meant anything like as much as the first, even though they were caught on a succession of absolutely new unique homemade baits upon each visit to the water!
Remember that I began making homemade carp baits as a young boy, by mixing bread, as paste, or ordinary wheat flour, with anything I could find in the kitchen cupboard. If you compare a bait made using Marmite and wheat flour and honey and a bit of coconut oil or sesame seed oil, with Mainline cell their a number of similarities which would surprise most people. The potency of the active components is probably the biggest difference ultimately, and this leads me into modern ingredients and additives, and seriously powerful substances which achieve very strong feeding responses, and attract carp outstandingly effectively.
To most beginners to carp bait making bait seems a complex thing, yet in fact everyone including those making modern ready made baits all started out in the same way, using a small number of ingredients, most usually making bait for their own personal use in their kitchen!
So you are simply doing the same as the founders of all the leading brand bait companies today, except that you can make homemade baits equally as effective if not more so as a massive percentage of ready made commercial baits!
Believe you can beat every single leading brand of ready made bait, and you will! It just takes bait element choices and approaches and angles of refinements, plus consistent testing over time. This is exactly how the leading brand commercial baits evolved and been developed anyway!
The big difference is that with homemade baits, only you alone are using your very own secret bait so you always keep the massive edge of being unique and different, (in complete contrast to every angler competing against others using exactly the same ready made bait!)
Bait can be one ingredient plus water. Historically bread or some kind of other wheat or other flour and water has caught as many carp as any other bait going back through the centuries.
Wheat contains substances that encourage animals and birds to eat their seeds, and promote the distribution far and wide to improve their survival. It seems very few anglers realise that semolina is actually a hard ground form of wheat, and actually the original form, before the soft triploid wheat used in bread making today! (The daily bread food thing from the bible is based on hard forms of wild wheat which existed thousands of years ago!)
Nature provides so many challenges to us, but nature provides the solutions too; it depends on your focus! Do you choose to think like an angler, or choose to think like a fish?
By this I mean if your only aim is to find a magic formula or bait recipe, then you will discover that after any length of time fish will begin to resist your bait out of primary survival instincts relating to exposure to your bait. Bait needs to be adapted and evolve, be redefined and refined, just as carp constantly adapt and adjust to new threats they associate with, and bait is just another threat once it becomes successful!
So you need to think ahead, think like a fish, and adapt and evolve your thinking!
For example, whether you are a bait or big carp angling beginner or have years of experience, it really pays to think out of the box of current paradigms, out of fashionable, majority mindset instilled approaches, methods, and old ways of doing things! Be different, and give your carp completely unique experiences so they regard your baits as a new opportunity, instead of an old threat!
Marmite has always been one of my favourite baits and bait additives. It is a brewing industry bye product which has a huge number of highly beneficial features, and characteristics which make it an ideal carp bait substance to use to catch small and big carp successfully!
It is more economical to use yeast extract instead of a leading brand. I checked out the two products in a super store yesterday, and the major difference was that Marmite is nearly 10 percent salt content, and contains celery extract, whereas the non branded product has less salt and has no celery content. However each is comparable where it most matters as each contains those vital stimulatory amino acids and vitamins etc essential to attract and trigger feeding in carp.
If your aim is to catch big carp over 30 pounds in weight then have not fear about any differences between incredibly successful bait thinking for small fish, and big fish.
The fact is that there are no significant differences between such baits! Big old mature carp that have already grown their basic skeletal frame structure require less protein and less other aspects of carp bait elements simply because their metabolism and rate of growth differs to young faster growing carp.
But you are not making carp bait to make carp grow faster or to put on weight!
You are making carp baits to produce the most intense feeding possible to achieve as many bites and chances of hooking wary carp as possible, preferably providing carp with benefits of taking your baits which boost their well-being and balanced health and longevity!
During the early eighties I used to correspond with one of the leading pioneers of carp bait product thinking and bait development; Rod Hutchinson and I became a field tester of his new products. I had the impression that big carp were harder to catch. He simply wrote back explaining the reason why big carp were easier to catch was because they need to eat more food than small carp!
I have pondered this point for years and years, especially the profound impacts of being able to create intensive feeding situations by exploiting bait substances in combinations, to make fish feed and compete perhaps in ways that make carp extremely vulnerable to capture compared to the ways carp anglers usually approach creating feeding situations. I always aim to do better, to find out more, to dig deeper, to test baits with more accuracy, find patterns, study carp behaviours more in order to influence and programme carp behaviours more uniquely in my own favour!
One of the aspects of a very well known bait today is the use of and inclusion of yeast. Bread contains yeast, and considering how many carp over centuries have been caught on bread it is very much worth a deep study to find out all of its most significant features, components and characteristics, to learn from, in creating homemade carp baits, and adapting and improving ready made boilies, pellets and mixes etc of all forms!
Wheat flour is a fine soluble ingredient I have used for years for carp, and I favour using it instead of the hard wheat known as semolina which is actually pretty insoluble, and this point is highly significant if you want to improve the success of your baits!
However, in this instance, in terms of introducing you to some kinds of basics about carp bait recipes, I aim to help you think differently. So Instead of wheat, I want you to think how you can begin by using a material which has more reason for being consumed by carp. Nitrogen sources are essential to carp survival and carp search for these all the time to sustain them, and relating to this, amino acid rich materials are very easy for carp to detect, as carp have evolved to be acutely sensitive to these vital substances in solution within the water surrounding them.
So carp have a very strong instinct to seek out and monopolise any new source of vital nutrients, for example ones as vital as amino acids, which are proven to induce feeding, and not to merely attract carp!
Using a material which has a superior profile of amino acids is a great edge, but you don not need to be an expert in the whole science of these things to exploit them. Most beginners simply find out if a food or material is a protein dense food or not!
So for example you might wonder whether to use sweet corn, or luncheon meat, or bread paste for your carp, and question why each of these work and which is a better bait. Well at this stage it might be more useful to suggest that you think out of the box, not ask too many questions and be practical in your bait testing. So therefore do try out the 3 baits if you use 3 rods, then try each bait on each of your rigs and actually record methodically how many bites you get on each, and how long it takes!
I am most interested in how long it takes. This is a fish feedback reference point of extreme importance to your success as a homemade bait maker, because if you aim to make your speed of response, and numbers of bites constantly improve, by refining and improving your baits, then you will become more and more successful!
So for example, there is a saying: Keep it simple stupid! This translates to carp bait and bait testing literally by using one ingredient in one level, and simply changing one thing in your bait to make a difference to results to test if it improves numbers of bites and speed of responses. Keep your baits as simple as possible to begin with, and you will remove as many variables as possible, and you will learn exactly how much of one or a few additives and ingredients work really well, used in the highest levels possible!
To initially create homemade bait I am not suggesting you make boilies, but baits which have the most instant response! In every case dough or paste baits with the same exact base mix and liquids as the boiled or steamed baits versions have a faster response over all. These get more bites because they are more active in the water and their components disperse far more effectively to attract and stimulate carp when compared to boiled or steamed baits!
I am not a believer in just giving recipes away, and the reason is that you need to realise that bait is a journey, and never a destination, because it is merely a reflection of a moving target, i.e. carp which constantly adapt and evolve in response to opportunities and threats. Therefore keep on evolving your baits, keep on refining your baits, and you keep ahead of your carp, all the time!
But here is a simple recipe suggestion as a beginner bait, which uses thinking outside of the most common, and is different. Just because a bait is simple does not mean it will not catch fish of over thirty pounds in weight! (It is simple because there is so much that can be optimized and maximized in a bait!)
Betaine HCL at 20 grams.
97 percent pure betaine at 10 grams.
Extra strength garlic powder at 3 grams.
Blue cheese powder at 100 grams.
Squid liver powder at 200 grams.
Pure liver powder at 50 grams.
Hydrolyzed poultry protein at 50 grams.
Concentrated yeast powder at 100 grams.
Yellow pea protein isolate (75 percent protein) at 300 grams.
CC Moore Meggablend Red at 200 grams.
Liquids to add your dry powder mixture to: Liquid molasses and liquid probiotic yeast (mixed.)
Plus butyric acid at 1 milliliter per kilogram of base mix.
Plus pure squid liver oil, and triple-filtered premium grade salmon oil at 3 to 5 percent of your total liquids per kilogram.
How you actually make, and apply your baits is your creative choice, and developing your own creativity is essential to ensure your baits are always unique and different!
So my advice is to think out of the box, and avoid replicating common things you find with popular readymade bait designs! 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.
