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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!)

Every time I have used a homemade bait that is different to the popular baits on a water, big fish have appeared and this is one of those definite points about carp which you can exploit using homemade baits. Fish learn by association and will find your new baits much harder to resist than popular readymades that already have been exploited. This difference is often the factor that decides if you get a run of big fish, or just average results, or series of memorable personal best fish sessions or lots of blanks!

You just need to fish sensibly and thoughtfully as you would normally for any big wary fish in order to be consistently successful. There is such a special and unique thrill and great sense of satisfaction when you catch fish, especially big fish like carp, catfish, bass, tench or even pike on your own homemade bait. One crucially important point about homemade baits is that you have no chance of anyone ruining your own chances by also fishing using your bait.

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!

Homemade baits often succeed far longer than many readymade baits purely because you are the only one using that particular bait! Baits for carp are often termed attractor baits or food baits depending on their nutritional value to the fish biologically speaking. High flavour levels and high concentrations if used are sometimes an indicator of a bait being more of an instant attractor type of bait much more than a food or nutritionally stimulating oriented bait.

You might have read about making homemade baits and had the impression it has to be difficult and time consuming despite being more economical by far than using commercial baits. However it is in reality so easy to make homemade baits that catch fish over forty pounds that a 12 year old can do it and that is the real truth. There is no obligation for you to make baits anything like resembling commercial baits, all smooth, round barrel shapes perfectly formed and so on. In fact to copy them would lose you many hidden advantages that are not lost making very different baits! You do not even have to roll baits into balls at all or even boil them to produce boilies and there are very easy ways to avoid any time consuming parts in making baits.

Many fisherman overlook the advantages of not making their baits oval in shape. Remember carp remember, so using angular baits or non oval baits is a definite advantage. Just with a handful of eggs and a pound of semolina and soya flour you can make limitless different baits utilising any of thousands of additives and flavors, sweeteners and appetite stimulators and so on, or just one! Such a bait will form a protective skin if you drops pieces of such baits in water or scald them with steam. Why bother boiling your baits when bait which is merely dried in warm air are frequently more effective than boilies?

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.

When your dough is ready you can use it immediately, or put it labelled plastic bags for later use. Store baits in the fridge or freeze them. It is best to make a note of the ingredients and levels in each individual bait mix. To make around a kilogram of bait it takes about 6 eggs with your dry powders. But this is a very rough guide and every mix can vary widely depending on ingredients, their solubility etc.

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!

homemade baits can look very unusual to a readymade bait user, but then when a fish encounters it is very much more likely to take it into its mouth, than a more conventional bait it sees 24 hours a day with a hook in it. This is why so many homemade baits catch so many big fish compared to very many readymade baits as the biggest fish have least reason to reject them out of conditioned fear through being hooked previously. Homemade bait makers might appear to get lots of beginners luck with big fish and this is no coincidence; unusually consistent big fish catches are very easily possible with a little more knowledge of bait making!

By Tim Richardson.