Sports » fishing bait

How To Choose Your Fishing Bait

Bob Smith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:44:08 +0000

by Bob Smith
Every person who fishes has their favorite type of bait. It probably comes from successfully using the bait on several occasions. Then the result? It's a great bait.

Crawfish was my bait of choice when I was in Missouri. You just couldn't beat them for trout or a small mouth bass. But I haven't had much luck finding crawfish in other places. But I will say this, if you can find these little crawdads as they are called in Louisiana, buy and use them. Crawfish are a great way of attracting fish.

Live minnows are used by many fishermen as the live bait of choice. It's an especially attractive bait when you are fishing from a boat. Otherwise you're going to have to figure out how to carry around the bait bucket.

Live worms have long been the subject of comedy routines. People just don't know how to put a worm on a hook. When a gang hook is used a worm stretches out and looks natural. The fish don't get suspicious and you catch more fish.

There are some folk who wouldn't consider using live bait. I mean, like never. For these folk, synthetic bait can be real useful. Synthetic bait has come a long, long way in the past few years. Some of the new synthetic bait is nothing short of amazing. Today synthetic bait comes in every shape, form and type of bait you can imagine. With synthetic bait you can be ready to fish at a moment's notice.

But when the day ends its all about getting out on the water and doing it. That's fishing, not talking or debating the best bait. Without practice in fishing you'll never be good. And a good angler catches the fish. So try the different baits, but most of all get out there and fish.

About the Author:

Live baits are best purchased at a nearby bait shop, but it's always a good idea to have some synthetic bait with you, and that you can get at The Daiwa Shop.

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How To Choose Your Fishing Bait

Fishing Bait Tips

Tim Richardson — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:22:25 +0000

by Tim Richardson
You can make carp baits as easy and simple or as complex as you want but one thing is certain and that is, for best results you need to make sure your baits are as unlikely to arouse as little suspicion in fish as possible. To do this you need to leverage the top rule with fishing bait; that of making your bait unique and different! A new different bait has the best potential to tempt big wary carp because even where a so-called food bait or nutritional biological value bait is established, once fish get hooked on it, then fish feeding behaviour on it can alter dramatically!

Improving your baits competitive edges is all about adapting their ingredients or adding extra ones soaked in, or treating the bait with a new process so it smells and tastes different to its previous version. Other carp can senses come into the equation and be exploited in regards to texture, colour, density, shape, buoyancy, firmness, solubility and permeability etc. However you do it, changing a bait in even one small way can sustain your results on it or even totally transform your results far more positively!

To prolong the life of a readymade bait or produce a new homemade one, you have an amazingly diverse fishing bait industry offering decades of experience and field tested products proven to catch fish. So finding new products and combinations of them you can trust is easy. But there are literally thousands of products which can be exploited which are not usually used by carp anglers and theses often have potent competitive edges over the most popular proprietary ones on pressured carp waters.

Many anglers love to use flavors and others steer clear of using them. But one thing for sure is that the majority of anglers are only aware of a tiny fraction of forms of flavors and flavor substances and components available to use in our baits. The concentrated solvent based flavors so commonly used to change the smell and taste characteristic of a bait are a minor part of what you can leverage for great results!

We can associate flavors with fruits and sugars of many kinds from oranges and pineapples to apples, pears, butter and cream, spices and herbs, molluscs and crustaceans, fish and everything in between and those besides. But many flavors are beyond what most anglers would even term flavors and have bitter, sour, salty, sickly, acidic, highly pungent even repulsive effects on us humans, but carp absolutely love them. It is an interesting fact that complete digestion of many substances occurs as a direct result of bacterial action to help break down food in the gut which enzymes alone cannot digest. In this example, this means that flavors and ingredients that are partially digested or even represent or mimic these can be super attractive to fish

Whether you prefer food baits or flavors or even artificial baits like plastic corn or pellets, all can lose effectiveness after repeated captures of fish on any particular water. This is why constantly tweaking or altering your baits in minor or sometimes major ways can extend your catch results on them. The fishing bait industry is all too aware of exploiting this by offering multitudes of new products every year.

When you realise that carp will pick up anything between its lips to more fully sample and identify its potential a food you can understand why practically any bait will hook a carp at least once or never again. This means that fake baits are not the super baits many seem to think as over time these bait forms too will lose their initial advantages and edges through over-use and repeated capture conditioning of fish. Just by handling them you are tainting them with substances carp can detect and associate with danger if hooked on them and encountering them in the future.

So what is the translation of making a bait different in order to achieve perpetual edges over your fish especially in regards to bigger fish? The fact is there are thousands of substances to exploit and just one can make all the difference and transform your results. Put as simply as possible, fish and humans share numerous very vital processes which all relate to energy and its efficient use.

Fish and humans share many of the same vital processes and body chemicals we need to survive. A familiar and popular bait additive today is betaine which fish and we use in digestive juices which is also significantly used to remove harmful products in the body. Betaine is one of those substances which is found naturally abundant in nature and which our and fish bodies extract from natural foods for a balanced healthy body. So it makes sense being abundant in our natural foods that our bodies can instinctively senses its need for it and our food detection senses code for this substance strongly.

Betaine even rivals many essential amino acids carp require in their natural diet and its effects upon food palatability and synergistic interactions with amino acids in baits and in the carp body demonstrate how important this substance is in carp baits! Betaine is a bit like sugar and salt and even flavor components like malic acid which really intensify the effects and profiles of other substance like amino acids and other flavors etc at carp receptor sites all over its body from lips, face, fins, flanks, in the throat and gill areas and even in the gut itself. Yes betaine is a big fish substance for sure!

You can help your bait enhancing and bait making efforts enormously by looking at how the food we eat is formulated. The food industry go to great lengths to get substances in our food which make you eat more of it, even to the extent of training our taste buds with all that sugar, salt, yeast extract, and the vast number of other healthy and unhealthy additives hidden away in long ingredients lists. When I began writing books and articles many scoffed (please excuse the pun,) at my claims that there are many addictive substances to exploit for use in baits for big fish; just 2 clues are the capsaicin receptors found in carp, and the addictive effects of certain cereal gluten substances which release feel-good but addiction forming endorphins in carp brains! Fishing blends well with other outdoors recreation and sport activities like hunting, camping, boating and other such hobbies and but so knowing as much as possible about your improving your fishing baits will ensure you always have better results; guaranteed!

By Tim Richardson.

About the Author:

Now get the very best homemade bait making resources available: "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And: "BIG CATFISH And CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "FLAVORS And CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS!" SEE: carp baits Many top name anglers use these bait improving guides today!

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Fishing Bait Tips

Save Money With Homemade Bait

Tim Richardson — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:28:05 +0000

by Tim Richardson
Fishing bait from fishing shops can really make going carp fishing an expensive passion! Many anglers are now so conditioned to using readymade baits that they have never seriously considered the huge advantages of making very unique baits for themselves, but they will catch as many if not higher numbers of fish than commercial baits. The fact that homemade bait will cost you a fraction of the cost of readymade baits and over the days and weeks shocking savings can be achieved with no less fish (in fact quite the opposite!)

Having a unique bait is one of the greatest competitive advantages in fishing. This is very often the factor which tips fish over from the state of just testing a bait, to actually taking it into its mouth along with your hook, and giving a very desirable run. There is no doubt in my mind after over 3 decades of making homemade fishing baits, that they can compete against commercial readymade baits on any water or venue.

Of course it takes the usual fishing skills and application in order to catch any fish especially those bigger ones which are far less easily caught, but your unique bait is a distinct factor in producing for you consistent big fish catches. One of the most incredible highs is to land new personal best fish on bait you have made from your own recipe and knowing you are the one angler who is ever going to exploit your secret bait. You never have to compete with hundreds of other fishermen on the same bait as you!

Bait only really has a peak of effectiveness when fish feed confidently on it because they know they most likely will not get hooked and risk getting taken home for tea. Sure we put them back, but if you were hooked and dragged out of your safe air environment into a foreign one you would be wary of any bait that has led to you being hooked previously too! Making your own alternative secret bait recipes is such a great advantage over the masses who use readymades without a further thought to their never talked about disadvantages!

On the point about fish learning by association, you will also find with readymade baits that they frequently have to be changed to new ones because they get over-used and fish associate them with danger of hooking or capture. Whereas with homemade bait this rarely happens because you alone are fishing your bait so it cannot get over-used so intensively as readymades. This means your baits will remain effective very likely indefinitely which means you can focus on your fishing and have complete confidence that your bait is always working to best effect and has not blown! Some baits get based around flavor attraction on a carbohydrate ingredient base mix. Many others utilise to a greater extent a food bait approach using nutrition as the fish feeding triggering mechanism.

I could not believe how easy and simple it was for me to make baits that hooked big fish straight away literally while still hot, even using the most basic of ingredients. Homemade baits can be just amazingly instant and fill you will so much confidence. I do not even bother to make baits that have a round or barrel shape or an even skin at all and I most often do not even boil them to make them resilient boilies either. This is because your greatest edge with bait is their difference. Therefore if you bait feels different, has a different shape, colour, texture, buoyancy, density, firmness or softness or permeability or solubility for example, then it is far more likely to out-fish readymades with ease! That is why making homemade baits is so easy.

As I said, round baits are not needed. Things have changed drastically in the last 3 decades. There are many methods which introduce free baits well over 100 metres accurately, including ground bait slings, spods and PVA bags and nets etc. So you do not need to ever roll your baits. To make a starter effective bait you need only use one ingredient or a couple like soya flour and semolina, add enough eggs to bind them together, and make a dough to use as bait (and every bait can be different!) These might be used as paste or cut or divided into many different shaped and sized bits which you might scald with water or boil for a few seconds to harden them up to make them more resilient.

The easy way to make a paste or boilie bait base mix is to use about 6 hen eggs in a pot or bowl, whisked with about 5 millilitres of a cake flavor and 1 millilitre of intense sweetener. Then slowly add a fifty - fifty mixture of semolina powders and soya flour or maize meal or corn flour, until you have a workable dough, not too sticky and soft and not too firm to pull apart easily.

Now you can use the dough as fresh bait or opt to label some sealed plastic bags and store it in the fridge for a few days or to freeze it in advance of going fishing. You most likely will forget what you made your baits out of so it is best to write this somewhere so you can remake your winning baits repeatedly! It is possible to get a ball of dough weighing about a kilogram from a 6 egg mixture; this will obviously vary depending upon the various ingredients you choose to include and their levels. Some ingredients will hold water better than others while some might dissolve readily in water, and the practical advantages of each kind are easy to exploit depending if you want hard baits which break down slowly or ones which dissolve and spread their attraction very quickly.

I understand value like anyone else so making homemade bait for 3 pounds as opposed to buying it for 12 pounds makes great economic sense. This is startling especially when you think of the saving on 10 or 20 kilograms of homemade baits compared to commercially produced readymade ones. The saving can be in the region of 80 or 90 pounds for just 10 kilograms of bait. You will have been using many kilograms in a season so figure your savings on homemade bait, it could easily total you not hundreds but thousands of pounds so easily saved!

If having a different bait can produce such a difference in results you may as well have the goal of being as innovative as possible with yours as you create new versions for those big fish you dream of catching. The spooky thing about new baits on a water is that they very often produce the biggest most sought after fish within a short space of fishing time because they are fresh and new. Now this is as great a motive as anyone needs to take up bait making and is the icing on the cake. You can use simple forms of bait mentioned here, but you will discover that with successful baits comes the excitement of making more creative ones, and bait making can be extremely exciting, even an integral addictive part of your fishing, as you thirst for more information!

By Tim Richardson.

About the Author:

These volumes provide decades of bait secrets: "BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And: "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "FLAVORS, FEEDING TRIGGERS and CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS!" SEE: http://www.baitbigfish.com These books are even used as reference by members of the British Carp Study Group so are well worth a look!

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Save Money With Homemade Bait

Big Carp Fishing Baits

Tim Richardson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:23:10 +0000

by Tim Richardson
It will probably come as a surprise to many fishermen that fish alternate frequently between one feeding mode and another, in order to best profit from various food opportunities available in the aquatic environment even within a short time period and this can change many times even over an hour or 24 hour period. The way fish feed is key to how best to tempt them in order to get a hook in their mouth and catch them, but few anglers actually give this immensely important subject the attention it demands. But the good news is that you can induce many fish feeding modes simply and easily in order to catch more fish purely by exploiting what comes naturally to them...

It is well-known that jokers and blood worms have often been banned as baits from various fisheries because they impact upon the feeding behaviour of fish so much. Many species of fish and in particular the Cyprindae genus of fish, have many adaptations which help them switch between modes of feeding to exploit the higher profitabilities of one mode over another, depending on which forms of food are available and where they are located in the water or bottom sediment.

For instance, fish can harvest the extremely nutrient rich algae purely by sucking on stones and gravel. They can also particulate feed and filter on zooplankton and algae for instance in the upper layers of the water in spring and summer especially when building up reserves of energy before and after spawning activities. This reflects in the ways that fine bread and fish meal based ground baits can be fed upon in ways where the fish do not have to actually feed on the bottom, but consume it higher up in the water in suspension.

This kind of feeding or similar can be used to further explore the potential of your hook baits and free baits as food items even before your bait is actually touched by a fish. You might have seen a fish suddenly dart towards a bait after having started gulping in water first to taste your bait more efficiently using taste buds in the pharyngeal cavity in the gill area. Fish also use gulping in a snapping motion in a mobile pump feeding) or static position to filter feed and particulate feed and carp and bream do this much of the time in turbid lakes; lazy of what!

When filter feeding and using similar and related modes, carp can actually benefit from you baits nutrition and attraction without even touching them which definitely has its advantages if you use this to excite them fully before they actually feed. Such things as vegetable and fish oils, fine crustacean and milk extract powders and liver and digestive tract extracts for example, can all be exploited, but there are thousands of choices. You bait substances through carp filter feeding can induce a feeding frenzy state even before your carp have even swallowed a single bait!

Bass and trout and even carp, bream and fish like crappie roach and barbel all filter feed to different degrees. This finely adjusted feeding is achieved using what is called the branchial sieve structures which are adjusted in order to energy efficiently exploit more abundant nutritious food particles and natural organisms. Carp can even suction filter feed at least an equal head length away from its head which is similar in energy and movement efficiency as a sheep seen feeding on grass on its knees although fish use far less energy in general movement compared to terrestrial animals not supported in water.

It often seems to be the case that carp fishing baits focus goes on chemical smells for instance which are very obvious to our senses, but it needs to be remembered that fish have extremely fine tuned lateral line cells which use electrochemical impulses in the detection of food items even by the tiny movements of zooplankton only 1 millimetre in diameter. The gape size of a fish's mouth is normally not a limiting factor in efficient feeding, but the diameter of the area where the food is chewed is and it is often far less than the gape of the mouth. Therefore its makes sense to exploit this and use smaller baits than often recommended. In fact carp in turbid lakes predominantly depend on food which is in particle size, so why not go with this approach not against it!

Smaller food items can naturally be passed to the throat teeth in mouthfuls without any problem and of course the more energy efficient the food delivery system is the better. It can often be the case that small baits are the preferred choice of more experienced big fish anglers because they can see the benefits of smaller food items in regards how fish feed on such baits and also their more natural weight, size and movement in water when combined with a correctly balanced hook rig. I find boilies in the 6 to 8 millimetre size excellent for bigger more wary fish even with huge mouths!

If you exploit the various filter feeding modes of fish using various grades of ingredients both soluble and insoluble in your ground baits you can certainly induce far more intense and suitable feeding for hooking wary big carp. You might recall the fact that fish are lateral lines are tuned to feel the movements of live foods like maggots and sound is important in ground bait effectiveness, but smaller hook baits are well recommended in conjunction with this. With carp one thing is for sure and that is when you leverage their mode of feeding or preferably specifically induce particular modes of intense feeding, you can vastly improve your catches all year round and all you need to know is a bit more about effective bait use and ingredients manipulation...

By Tim Richardson.

About the Author:

For expert help enhancing and making top fishing baits see: "BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "FLAVORS, FEEDING TRIGGERS And CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS" SEE: fishing baits Get your unique copies now!

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Big Carp Fishing Baits