You want to catch more fish so you really need to know a few vital things that put you ahead! You might have read in carp magazines what to do but here are some of the most powerful reasons why you really need to do certain things and most importantly why in order to optimise your baits and to maximise the numbers of fish you can catch! How you apply and adapt liquid foods is vital to your success!

Liquid foods are among the most potent substances you can exploit in your baits but they are nothing new. Honey and fermented proteinous foods among other things go back centuries, and molasses, sugar rich bioactive mineral and vitamin etc rich substances like honey and maple syrup and yeast extracts are just a few of the liquid foods that most carp anglers of my generation used in their special pastes, at least by the Seventies.

Liquids spread out into the water column extremely effectively and efficiently and can bring much faster results than just waiting for soluble powdered ingredients and additives etc in your baits to dissolve. This is just one reason why bait dips and soaks were so noticeably successful when used in the earlier days of winter fishing.

These days bait dips and soaks are used universally all year round by anglers without much thought at all; these have simply become yet another fashionable thing to do. Yet in the early eighties it became very much a habit of mine by way of experimentation to keep my baits in very much more hydrated forms and one method was to over load baits with liquid foods and include loads of sugar rich ingredients to in order to suck water inside baits and release soluble triggers and attractors etc far faster than normal! It is so ironical that syrups are sold by bait companies as something new, after all refiners (golden) syrup and black syrup and corn steep liquor have been used in carp baits for decades and decades!

But like most things in carp fishing, it takes only a little thought in order to create huge competitive edges. For instance, in the early eighties I was soaking my baits in neat flavour concoctions and massively improving my catches and this was not simply about fishing single hook baits at range, but over beds of boilies crumbled up and also soaked in neat flavours at close range or at range using homemade slim line spods.

You would be amazed at what you can use to deliver flavours to your swim that will cost far less than readymade baits. I could list dozens and dozens of material I have used with great success that deliver loads of stimulatory liquids into swims near or far, and many alternative methods too! A very simple edge is soaking the cheapest oats in neat flavours added to the cheapest liquids you can find boosted by cheap yeast extracts or more soluble yeast powders and molasses for instance.

I disagree that you need the readymade commercial liquids all the time without a seconds glance at other options. Having researched this kind of subject for the last 5 years it is shocking just how many foods in the local supermarket contain very vital feeding triggers, essential nutrition and stunning taste enhancers, attractors, sweeteners, and many bioactive factors that very much improve your results and differentiate your standard baits and baiting approaches and so on to keep you ahead of the fish and competing anglers!

Most of the ingredients and additives that can be bought from fishing companies can also be found elsewhere and often at cheaper prices. But even better than this, in so doing you will come across other substances maybe not even found in mainstream bait-making. These are among the secret substances with the components that can turn a good or a poor season into an incredible one. For example, I have a friend whom I advised on homemade bait substances for rivers that would reduce the numbers of smaller fish hooked and improve the weights and numbers of river carp and barbel hooked.

In the last 2 weeks he has put his new bait into action and his results have been simply staggering when compared to the rest of his season using popular readymade baits. The thing is though is that this result should not be any surprise whatsoever, especially considering his new baits are far cheaper than readymade bait. For one thing, in many waters, due to brand loyalty of anglers fishing there, the fish will most frequently basically keep on being fed the same baits over and over again, which contain the same essential nutrition and factors which those fish will inevitably come to recognise the more they get hooked on such baits.

If you imagine that you came along and established a bait with completely unique stimulatory factors and with a totally unique profile of stimulatory vital nutritional factors, then the fish will certainly for one thing have every reason to fall more easily for these baits due to simple lack of preconditioned caution, and all the more reason to exploit a new source of food that fills gaps that other baits and natural food do not fill in terms of complete nutrition needs at that moment in time.

If you know what you are doing you can deliberately alter readymade baits of all kinds of brands to be far more potent in the way they impact on the water and on fish, in different ways to standard baits! You do not have to make your own homemade baits of course, but having the knowledge to be able to do this to professional standards is priceless in empowering you to improve all your results with any readymade baits you happen to favour at any point in time. There are many substances and combinations of substances and more alternative special things you can do to readymade baits to improve their impacts on your fish that almost invariably will never have been exploited by any bait company; all it takes is the knowledge and awareness!

Liquids in baits are vital and as soluble or semi-soluble substances these really pack a punch but there are far more secrets to liquids than simply soaking boilies or pellets in them and expecting much improved results. For instance, all it can require is the addition of one or 2 totally unique new substances to skyrocket your catches despite suffering poor results on a water on readymade baits dipped in readymade bait dips.

All you need is understanding of natural principles of fish behaviours and means of manipulating and intensifying such behaviours and the right specific bait knowledge to succeed wherever your own fishing has possibly not lived up to previous expectations. You do not need to have a number of degrees in different scientific subjects to improve your baits. However one point I do want to highlight is that most anglers have little awareness of what their baits actually do when they interact with water and then make contact in any way with fish! To know much more about this when using readymade baits is a massive competitive advantage!

Also success is certainly not about use of huge volumes of bait which many well-known carp cult figures would have you believe; that is just a ploy to trick you into buying far more bait than you actually need and to make their companies loads of profits! In fact it is very shocking to discover just how many well-known anglers in the magazines know barely anything technically speaking not merely about the modes of action of their baits in fish and in water itself, (of bait substances in combination or even individually,) but in terms of impacts internally on fish!

This situation is simply crazy; you cannot have people recommending products when they do not understand them because you will certainly have even less chance of optimal success leveraging that bait and end up expecting miracles without the knowledge to truly exploit the individual advantages of a certain bait and its make-up! Just one example is this; years ago I fished a really well-known readymade bait on a water that had an amazing level of pressure. I fished it using all my bait chopped into halves and quarters and soaked in the proprietary strawberry oil and flavour recommended for those baits.

Yet my baits were totally under-optimised for performance! Sure I caught fish but what I know today tells me that I had absolutely no idea just how massively more effective those baits could have been optimised for that trip. Consequently I probably caught only a quarter of the fish I could have, and also missed out on numbers of very big fish, if not the largest and most wary fish in that lake. This is why really understanding bait is so extremely powerful!

If you are still in a mindset of using baits that have been heated in any way, such as boilies or steamed baits, then you are now in the Stone Age as far as I am concerned! I can make homemade baits that last as long functionally in the water as long as I will ever require them to last, but they are not boiled or cooked or heated in any way at all and so are still working to massively greater optimisation functionally and nutritionally!

Do not ever accept that your baits are catching you the most fish possible just because you and others are catching fish. I can guarantee you that you will not have optimised your baits as much as is possible and therefore you will have missed out on more fish or maybe bigger more wary fish. In fact if the average catch for an average individual on an average carp water is perhaps 50 to 300 fish in a season, you can bet that the actual numbers truly possible are more like 150 to 900 per season with correctly optimised and constantly adapted baits and bait formatting.

This is a scary fact that bait companies do not want you to know because for them to keep on making baits truly optimised and constantly adapted maybe even as often changed as every 3 weeks for highly pressured waters in order to keep ahead of the fish, this is just not a practical nor profitable possibility; but you can do this for yourself!

In fact I know from my personal conversations with many bait company bosses that most of the best baits they ever come up with will never be sold commercially because they simply are either not going to be accepted as practical baits by the masses, or they are simply not profitable to produce commercially for any of a whole host of possible reasons!

Anyway, the fact is that in making your own homemade baits you can make the kind of baits of the potency that commercial bait companies cannot offer for sale profitably! Even if all you do is use something familiar like supplementary lysine and ascorbic acid or lemon juice or vinegar or butyric acid for instance this can make all the difference to your catches. It depends a lot on what you are trying to optimise within your baits, the kinds of impacts you are aiming to achieve within your baits inside fish and actually in the waters, and so on.

Success with baits is far more about leveraging certain substances to intrinsically alter the brain chemistry and biochemistry of the bodies of fish, so altering their modes of behaviours and stimulating far more intensive, repetitive enthusiastic feeding so creating feeding situations where this would simply not have occurred using conventional baits and methods! 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.