15 Carp Fishing Bait Methods To Improve Your Hook Baits!

Many methods can be used to enhance your hook baits effects and productivity. The carp ability to learn is beyond doubt, otherwise they would simply be as easy to catch as they are when virgin fish which have never been fished for. One of the easiest ways to change your bait to get an extra edge over wary fish is to use a liquid bait soak consisting of flavours, oils or amino acids.

Oil rich dips and those rich in amino acids are outstanding and can come from simple homemade sources like tinned tuna oil mixed with liver pate and garlic salt for instance. Or maybe try shrimp paste with diluted fruit cordial juice and yeast extract; you do not need to spend a fortune on readymade dips or soaks etc. Don’t boil your hook baits; steam them instead to allow far more nutritional attraction and stimulation to release into the water instead of being sealed inside and largely wasted!

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 readymade baits have a surface which does not maximise their fish attraction in the water and it is important to break their surfaces to achieve far more takes. By making a boilies or pellets surface more irregular you can improve attraction leakage from the centre of the bait and fool fish into thinking your bait is safe, having previously been tested by other fish chewing on it! Using sharp scissors, knife or baiting needle you can easily improve the catch potential and attraction of your baits!

I bet you never tried coating all your free baits with paste as well as your hook baits. You could try fishing a red fish meal hook bait with a pink liver paste or a meat based bait with a fish based paste; just experiment with colours, flavours and any kind of baits together! Even coating particle baits like smaller pellets or tiger nuts with paste is very worth doing!

Try coating pop-up baits with paste to improve the effect and impact. It does not need to correspond to the flavour or base mix colour or anything else to make that essential difference and catching edge you need. Try adding cork granules or cork dust to your paste to make it buoyant or pop-up.

Many ingredients can be added to a paste or dough to make it buoyant or float and cork dust or granules are one example. Fish can be fooled into taking buoyant baits because they counter-act the weight of the hook and rig material among other beneficial effects. I’ve caught many big fish by using this approach but using buoyant paste hook bait wraps and often fish can come surprisingly quickly to this method!

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.