Secrets to Sport Fishing

When your catches are not as you wish there are many tricks to try; and improving the pulling-power of your hook baits is just one of these but it is a massively important one! Carp can be very difficult to tempt when previously hooked before on any bait, so aiming to make your hook baits unique can really pay-off. Liquid bait soaks have always been successful but you can make you own homemade ones very easily…

Easy homemade bait dips can be produced using the spare oil from canned fish or fresh mashed fish juices. Sandwich pastes and pates mixed with warm water are very effective too and shrimp, crab, duck and liver plus many others all work. You can mix easily available flavours in too, like fine rock salt, ketchup, fish source and anchovy source and fruit cordial juices etc. You will find your homemade boilies work better if you steam for a couple of minutes instead of boiling in their stimulating attractors and so on.

Coat your baits in bait dough or paste. This is this best way to fish a base mix paste because all the water soluble goodies get to work to the maximum effect on carp stimulus receptors. You might liquidise or just mash some tinned salmon, sardines, herring or mackerel and add wheat flour or ground-up dog mixers with some hemp or sesame seed oil for example; aim to be different!

Many anglers under-exploit their readymade baits they use because they have a relatively impervious surface. You can break-up this surface with a baiting needle, or sharp pointed knife or scissors to get more attraction out of your bait. Making your hook baits irregular shapes with irregular surfaces helps by making fish think your bait has been previously chewed on by other fish and so is safer.

Try coating your baits with a dough or paste. This does not have to correspond to the hook bait you use at all; it could be you use a red fish meal boilie coated with a yellow bird food paste mix. Or tiger nut coated in shrimp paste, or luncheon meat coated with aniseed flavoured ground bait based paste.

Making the leap of faith and trying coating pop-up buoyant baits with paste is a very good edge indeed and extremely well proven! The pop-up or semi-buoyant hook bait has no need to be like the paste around it and in fact the more alternative your paste is the better. Coating pop-up baits with paste is a great edge which is little-used by the majority of carp anglers and as you can see, these things just take a little lateral thinking utilising what we are already using.

You can add cork granules and other very light or buoyant ingredients to make it float or hang in the water off the bottom or silt or weed for instance. Imagine the advantage of using a buoyant paste around a bottom bait or semi-buoyant bait and how frequently your fish will have had to deal with this! Using buoyant paste around bottom sinking hook baits can seriously save you blank sessions!

It is a commonly held angling myth that fish do not learn, but in truth very many species can be conditioned by angling activities, bait introduction etc and even koi carp can be trained to take baits from out of a keepers hands and be in a particular place in advance of feeding time! If you think carp do not learn just consider that over time when repeatedly hooked by anglers, they do not get easier to catch but harder! It’s just the same with hunting of other kinds. For this reason alone it is definitely in your best interests to find out as much as possible how to maximise the impact and effects of your hook baits and free baits because a trap is only as good as the bait!

By Tim Richardson.

Tags: sport fishing charters, sports fishing, sport fishing boats