Fishing carp (I)

by Tibor

How To Make Easy Catfish And Carp Baits - Simple Cool Ingredients For Instant Catches!

I'm always messing about with baits it's so creative and fun. I even make my own flapjacks too! Making instant carp and catfish baits that really work can be very easy and simple without the need for too much technical know-how! Fishermen go on about 'nutritional attraction baits' versus 'flavoured attractor baits' versus 'fake and plastic baits' and so on and the difference in the prices of these baits can be enormous. But who cares what you use as long as it's safe, does the fish no harm and really catches you fish! Here's a few 'alternative' tit-bits on making baits that will catch you fish.

Your local stores can provide all you need but you can use specialist fishing additives and attractor ingredients too. Very easy baits for carp and catfish of many species and sub-species often utilise the same ingredients to stimulate the fish which makes things simple.

(You can make yourself some flapjacks, brownies or cinnamon scones while you're at it if so inclined, all the ingredients you need for these are eggs, self raising flour, sugar, salt, margarine and a raising agent like bicarbonate of soda.) Making these things is a great fun way to practice making good palatable baits for starters! As a side note, have you noticed how addictive 'Marmite' or 'Vegemite' (yeast extract spread) on toast with lashings of butter' is? Unfortunately it makes your feel dehydrated and maybe keen to have a drink, preferably a caffeine, milk and sugar containing coffee or tea to wash it down?

This is just to remind you how easy it is to get our body and mind in a particular state just by eating a simple snack or a 'simple' beverage. In fact these foods and drinks are popular because they are literally addictive. Once you've been having these for long enough, giving them up is something your body and mind can have trouble with and even give you withdrawal symptoms!

From the monosodium glutamate and salt in the 'Marmite,' to the opiates in the wheat flour, butter and milk, these foods have strong impacts on your body and mind. Even the fat in the butter and milk, the powerful effects of the caffeine in the beverages and even the sugar and its powerful taste enhancing effects leave you wanting more...

You really want your catfish and carp baits to be like this and it is easily achievable, especially by exploiting the high-tech refined specialist bait ingredients available today. However much more simple baits can offer a level of this effect too using ingredients from your average kitchen.
You can make a wide range of successful baits by using soya powder or meal and semolina as the basic dry powder mixture, but corn flour and wheat flour can be used too as base ingredients to make paste or dough baits or even boilies, but be sure to use 'plain flour' rather than the 'self-raising' types. Your base mix powder may not be very 'nutritionally attractive' at this point but this is easily remedied as you will see... Your baits do not have to be high protein wonder baits to catch big fish. Even these marvels can 'blow' and become less effective after fish have been caught on them enough times. In fact very simple carbohydrate type baits with a couple of added special ingredients to effect the fish in powerful ways are often enough to tempt the biggest fish. But you need to know what ingredients affect fish the way you want...

Can you imagine what adding an alcohol flavour does to you bait and how it affects the fish? What about garlic; what's really going on there? Why is liver and blood so effective? What about the effects of betaine, green lip mussel extract, or honey, molasses or brown sugar? Knowing about these type of effects on the fish might seem irrelevant, or are they?

For pastes or dough baits, just add water, or eggs to help binding and bait durability. The usual number of eggs used per pound of dry mixture is 4 per pound of dry mix to 6 per kilogram of dry mix. Added eggs will enable you to make skinned steamed or boiled baits too if preferred.
Baits with added eggs will have a higher protein level than those with water and when rolled into balls can be boiled in water or steamed in a pan to make them form a resistant coagulated skin which makes the baits last longer. You will discover that experimentation is the key to making baits and recording the amounts and ingredients you use will really pay you back especially when you want to re-make that 'bagging bait' and have forgotten what it contained!

You can do a short-cut by buying prepared cooking pastry mix. This is attractive because of its sugar salt, fat and wheat content, all of which can be pretty addictive and it can work well on carp, but needs more ingredients to get the catfish biting. You can make it that much better by rolling it out and liberally spreading peanut butter and yeast extract, like 'Marmite' or 'Vegemite' onto it, but the list you can add is endless. Liquidized chicken liver or pork liver are classic examples as are shad guts and chicken blood from a friendly butcher. However, Blood powder, liver powder and squid powder, fermented shrimp powder, shrimp and krill meal.