How To Make Carp Fishing boilies Using Easy Cheap Recipes That Beat Readymade Baits!

If you are ready to take the sensible step of making your own homemade boilies and pellets, now is an ideal time. Having been writing on this subject full time for the past 5 years means I know the interest in this subject has seriously grown recently as more and more anglers want to make their own baits and cut their bait costs. So join the new crowd and read on now!

I am finding difficult to write about bait right now because concentrating is pretty difficult with so many diverse ideas buzzing around my head! My major starting point is visualising how I want to manipulate fish physiology, senses and conditioned responses and thus their resultant behaviours by the leveraging of bait substances and components. My starting point is the fish and not bait ingredients OK! The majority of anglers get things the wrong way round! That is why so many anglers ask me to give them a bait recipe and hope or expect that all their fishing challenges and problems will go away or just disappear by magic!

My big point here is that understanding fish internally and externally and the ways substances that might be exploited as bait impact upon and within fish really are vitally important to your success as a homemade bait maker. This might sound over the top when you think well my semolina and soya or grits and oaties banana flavour boilie catches fish so what is the big deal?

The big deal is all the loads of occasions when such baits fail! This is particularly the case on waters where highly competitive highly nutritionally-stimulating baits very much impact upon fish behaviours, where if your bait is just not stimulating fish in any particular way that results in you getting as many if not more bites than any other anglers, then your baits are pretty worthless to put it mildly. So to ensure that you homemade baits actually do compete extremely successfully against the best of the best of the readymade and other homemade baits, you really need to understand fish. Fish are my starting point when designing my homemade baits and I have made my own baits since around the age of 6 so I have had a little practice at doing it wrong and doing it right!

More to the point I have had enough practice fishing homemade baits against the best readymade baits to know how to design homemade baits to equal and even out-fish readymade baits. Frankly to do this takes quite a lot of knowledge and refinement but with the right information about fish anyone can do it; even beginners!

Recently via Facebook yet another angler asked me for my best boilie recipe as they were planning to make a bait using pineapple flavour or was it banana as they had heard positive things about these flavours. All I could think was how much homemade bait making is such a lost art, to the point where any fashionable flavour or style of readymade bait that comes along conditions the mindset of the masses so that they get the totally inaccurate impression that they need to be using a bait like that!

What I mean is, if the average angler on my water was using a particular readymade bait then I would probably ignore that completely and offer fish what I know will have impacts and internal effects and all kinds of characteristics that the competing baits just do not offer at all! Being different is the easiest way to scramble up defensive behavioural responses that fish build up to avoid capture. For this reason I think it is insane to use round or cylinder-shape or pellet shape baits full stop!

Fish get thousands upon thousands of these to practice avoiding getting hooked on – so why on earth would any sane angler give fish that huge advantage immediately? You see when you make your own homemade baits you can produce literally any effect you want, you can make soft hairy or studded baits shaped like maggots or worms or leaves or an octopus or a fish a water snail or shrimp or whatever you like, just as long as it does not resemble a standard machine rolled bait!

So I am writing this article about being different but really it is about understanding what are the most vital reference points about baits that lead to carp getting a hook in their mouths and getting hooked. Baits need to inspire some level of reason to be tested even if out of curiosity with zero food value whatsoever. I prefer baits that have some responsive reason added to curiosity factor so it might be nutritional stimuli but can include other factors such as substances that change the water around the bait in particular ways that make baits far more easily detected. This might mean adding special hormone product, or fluorescent protein product or a substance that reflects a certain part of the light spectrum that fish are more sensitive to than us.

It might mean making fish detect minute electrical emissions or simply a background difference in the water around my bait. It might mean my baits actually move, fizz, bubble or produce sounds or vibrations due to various means. Or it might very simply mean that enormous plumes of extremely water soluble feeding triggers and attractants etc flow very easily from my baits compared to standard readymade baits of many kinds.

The best advice I can give you regarding how to improve the performance of standard boilie recipes is do not heat them at all. You can find ways to design baits to remain intact in water for over 20 hours without any heating at all OK! Soluble baits are king in my experience even if fished where smaller pest fish and crayfish are a challenge; these things are no problem when you get your baits and rand whole fishing approach right!

Ok so let us say you really have very little idea about how to design a bait in terms of exploiting fish sensitivities. Well you might think well I will use my own senses as a guide because my own senses such as that of taste and smell are basically like that of fish in that my cells have an aqueous lining through which substances diffuse so allowing me to detect substances such as a burger or Chinese takeaway or bakery when walking down the high street!

But baits do not have to relate to smell at all not taste. Flavours are often potent not merely for volatile or highly soluble components but for the internal impacts of certain bioactive components, or merely how they enhance and make more soluble other components in a carp bait or merely charge water around baits in specific ways. In fact many seriously potent bait substances that are lesser known on the bank among average anglers are not particularly detectable at all by most humans!

You might even say that in some ways, reasons why the vast majority of flavours make baits more effective is because of how they enable other bait substances within baits to become soluble and become far more easily detectable by fish homing in on your bait far sooner and far more turned onto feeding than would otherwise be the case. Flavours do have such a massive range of effects and of course flavours can mean all kinds of things apart from the most obvious solvent or natural-based ones.

For instance some substances found in milk and milk fractions and extracts can be found in synthetic butter and milk flavours. In this way you can definitely say that the dry milk powders, milk extracts such as caseins and caseinates, whey proteins etc are flavours in themselves that fish respond to, even if these have varying levels of water-solubility!

Many anglers make homemade baits with no additional flavours. But then again flavours are so diverse that they can literally be used as the significant trigger and attractor in a cheap bait. For instance what about a bait made using course crushed tiger nuts, with added tiger nut extract, tiger nut oil, high PC liquid lecithin, thaumatin, betaine hydrochloride, lactose, caseins, powdered enzyme or peptide products etc and calcium caseinate; with natural almond extract flavour added.

You might include hydrated and dry flies, beetles, insects, shrimps and silk worm pupae and also spirulina powder and coarse kelp and enhancing liquid kelp complex for example. This bait can break down and yet leave highly attractive particles on the bottom and higher up in the water column pulling fish down from all levels and at any time of year as it is an active style of bait (the form I prefer most of all of course for very obvious reasons!)

With such a bait you are hitting fish with a really good dose of water-soluble nutritional feeding triggers and attractors impacting internally on many levels and conditioning fish to seek the bait repeatedly rewarding them. At the same time as the bait is habit forming, it is also a very instant bait and one I would certainly use in paste form.

But it is just one of a huge armoury of ideas I might have to impact on multiple levels and maybe you want specific effects to out-fish certain readymade baits; who knows?

I am being distracted by the aroma of the pure capsicum (chilli) oil and pure Mexican garlic oil I have sitting next to me, and the homemade spicy citrus flavour I made using a still and evaporation apparatus. You might think such substances are among the most stereotypical forms of carp bait signals to you as an angler at least. But such things are so commonly used why should I use them when there is a whole host of other far more alternative options not used in mainstream bait making? Homemade baits certainly do not need to smell much at all; they can work on other levels and on other senses and react with water in very powerful ways to get noticed very easily by fish! It is all about getting the best information!

I also have powders I use for bait making (that are perfectly legal of course) obtained via health-related herbalists, that I cannot smell at all, that I know will have far more potent internal impacts on carp than either of these very smelly liquid extracts and flavours I just mentioned. When you think about it, how many pharmaceutical products come in tiny powder capsules or pelleted buttons that you cannot even taste on the tongue but have very great healing impacts or significant effects that lead to instant or gradual relaxation and de-stressing and relaxing of the muscles and nervous system?

I will leave you with an extra thought here; what fish is easier to catch; a well fed fish or a relaxed fish? 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.