Soaking your carp or catfish baits in special liquids to improve your catches can cost quite a bit when you are buying small pots. Another thing is that you can actually make your own bait soaks with equal if not even more effectiveness than readymade ones! So have your eyes opened; save money and catch loads more fish - read on now!

In more recent years, pellets have taken the carp and catfish and barbel fishing worlds by storm. Boilies are still of course the number one choice for big fish around the world however. There are endless creative ways to boost your readymade baits and homemade baits effectiveness. One very simple way is to crush up some of your choice (or mixed choices) of boilies, and soak the boilie crumb in hot water. This particular method ensures the bait recipe you are using equally matches the bait profile you are soaking, although this is not an essential ingredient for success and in fact your dip can be as different as you like from your bait itself.

Simply leave for a day or maybe more and stir the runny mixture so you have in effect boilies in solution. Your then simply soak your baits in this solution to boost their impacts. Its very easy and obvious! This is great for baits straight from the bag or baits that have been dehydrated.

You can use the same method or similar methods for boosting all kinds of pellets, and meat and fish baits and even fake baits for example. You have no need to even think about being afraid of over-loading with any solvent based flavours and anyway using this method is very likely to reap bigger more wary fish.

Of course you can boost your special baits dips and soaks in endless ways so that they are more bioactive, or even so they preserve your baits. There are ways to drop or raise the pH of the solutions, make them very much more palatable in terms of vitamin and mineral and amino acid contents etc; its all up to you. In the height of the warmer temperatures when carp and catfish metabolism is peaking you can obviously go for a higher oil approach; this supplying the higher energy requirements fish have at this time in particular among others.

I'd always add a very high-grade high PC liquid lecithin anyway to improve bait digestion and general bait performance in regards to oils in baits, whether bulk oils or essential oils. (Visit Carpfishingpellets for liquid lecithin plus added extras like high-grade pure liquid salmon protein, and triple-filtered Scottish salmon oil for instance, and pure betaine HCL; such things really are very effective individually or used together!)

Making homemade liquids to boost baits is a massive subject and I could write a book about it. You can use the same liquids to boost your ground baits, particles, slop mixes, pop-ups, boilies, stick mixes and almost anything. You can very seriously boost your baits with substances that trigger feeding or with substances that attract fish into your swim very highly effectively. You can use naturally-derived extracts extremely rich in natural feeding triggers to turn fish onto feeding, or even use very easily dispersed flavours to boost very open texture un-boiled baits, to seed you swims and spots, that wash out fast but leave a sediment of paste on the bottom for warier fish to home in on.

If you want an idea for just one unusual bait soak you might try an idea just off the top of my head – maybe combine CC Moore Kelp Complex with their awesome Liquid Salmon and Krill extract and perhaps tailor this and customise this in any additional way you wish – maybe boost it using Belachan, or Cyprivit and Feedstim XP powder, or hydrolysed poultry protein etc.

Liquid recipes can be as unusual and alternative as you like – as potent and as concentrated as you like; I aim to keep an open mind when experimenting and I always seem to be finding new substances not in popular use at all in carp or catfish fishing to use in my bait soaks. As a quick tip try some of the more esoterically orientated health food and alternative herbal type websites for instance. (See below for more on this stuff!)

The range of additives, ingredients, extracts and pure substances, both natural and artificially created can all have their place in your bait dips and soaks for very powerful reasons and your fish will certainly thank you by getting hooked more often! 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.