When autumn, winter and early spring conditions make carp much harder to catch you need to really think about how you are using your baits, if you are using them to their full potential to catch the most fish, and how you can do things to improve your catches. Many readymade baits may well be actually reducing your chances of getting as many bites as possible. Maximise your chances of bites to a much greater degree and read on now to find out more!

If you are using high protein baits in cold water temperatures in particular this can seriously reduce your catch rate. The reason for this is very simple. In low temperatures fish may take well over 12 hours or more; or even 3 days to digest your bait before it begins to feed again. Meanwhile it is busy not feeding and using energy digesting the bait it has already consumed. This is not exactly the situation you want because every hour that fish are not feeding but digesting baits is wasted fishing time! You might be aware that in past decades very high protein milk ingredient dominated baits were usually used very sparingly compared to the mass baiting of fish based pellets and boilies for instance in use today.

Very many cold water bait designs exploiting a mere 22 percent protein for instance will be digested much faster in low temperatures and you can expect fish eating and filling up on your baits to have digested them in just 8 hours for instance - and then again be actively feeding again (and so available to catch once again.) This of course means you get far more chances of more bites as you have more actively feeding fish available.

In some respects high protein boilies are probably more suited to pre-baiting scenarios in many situations and periods of the year where you can leave a baited swim for 3 days and expect to find actively feeding fish looking for more of your bait upon your return. It makes logical sense that when fish are full of high protein bait they need a longer period to digest such baits during which your bait is not catching you fish if you are trying to catch them during this period of time.

Full up fish tend to move away from actively fished baited areas in order to find somewhere quiet to most efficiently digest their food. Often such quieter areas are not the kind of areas in lakes that produce very many fish. Similarly such areas are often the retreat of fish that have been recently hooked and are in a state of recovery.

Also it may be noticed that in the case of big fish on angling-pressured waters, more frequently than not the majority of the fish will be caught in areas that receive the largest volumes of free baits This is something that Dave Lane and Terry Hearn and Jim Shelley exploit all the time by massively baiting up regularly even in winter…

This is just a simple indication of how extremely energy-efficient carp so often are in their feeding even despite the pressures angling puts on them. It is obviously energy-efficient to browse regularly fed areas particularly when your instinctive behavioural defence mechanisms for dealing with suspicious baits and rigs is extremely well honed from 24 hours-a-day practice!

Now just in case you are a the type of angler who continues to use oily pellets and fish meal boilies for example into winter, you might be over-looking this fact but if your bait is steeped in oils in cold conditions this will reduce or in very low temperatures totally prevent digestion of various elements of your baits! Oils of many kinds actually seal up your baits so the soluble components of your baits cannot disperse. Think about the implications this has on your catch rate!

For a long period I tested fishing in low winter temperatures using popular pellets compared to open-textured easily digestible homemade boilies and the results were very distinct. When water temperatures were under around 12 degrees the open texture easy-digest boilies seriously out-performed the medium to high oil (low viscosity oil) types of marine type pellets. I had to try this experiment just to prove the point in practice to myself so it was not merely hearsay or theory.

The fact that the oily pellets had been very successful in much higher temperatures just underlined how their effectiveness as baits had dive-bombed in the period around the late autumn, winter and early to mid-spring when water temperatures were yet to rise. Of course medium to high lipid content fits conditions when carp metabolism is very high due to elevated water temperatures when oxygen saturation is sufficient to promote high activity and heavy feeding.

In winter, obviously if any bait is in the right place it can catch fish but if inducing as many bites as possible form almost torpid fish is your goal and you wish to maximise all your valuable time, money and efforts you need to use a very attractive bait suited to prevailing conditions not just in water but within the carp too.

Often you get totally illogical statements from anglers on the bank who say things along the lines of: I prefer to use fish meal baits on this particular water in the winter. If you ask them if they know the ingredients and their ratios of their baits and how long their gut transit times are through the gut in low temperatures regimes they simply how no idea. Added to this and even more importantly, they do not even know why these baits might possibly make fish actually be attracted to them - as opposed to being actively repelled by them in the first place.

There is a vast diversity of baits that catch winter carp. Very many of these are not high protein baits but they catch big carp and have done for years. The other day I had someone ask me about peptones and their impacts on various fish meal ingredients. Peptones are in general a range of substances composed of protein constituents that are broken down into their smaller elements by various means and as such are easily water-soluble and easily detected by carp. My question for him was what percentage of his bait ingredients and additives and liquid foods etc consisted of soluble substances that are very easily digested by carp.

The fact is that he did not know these things meant that asking me about peptones would basically be meaningless to him. Peptones are produced from very many various protein sources. This guy did not know which versions he was specifically wanting to use (or why) and what jobs they were going to be specifically aimed at doing. Such things do not just impact on carp internally and externally but also work within baits working synergistically as a whole.

Cold water baits are so much about easy digestion and it is easy to see why. After all, you are after getting as many bites as possible - and certainly not into feeding up the fish at the expense of bites! It seems to me that many bait buffs go carp fishing in order to grow monster carp by their baiting up and not so much to maximise bait for its potential to achieve the most bites possible and thus the most hooked fish.

Now on to a related subject regarding homemade base mixes. I really like fishing with bait base mixes in various more conventional or more unusual forms. Stick mixes are just one example where you can make up your own boilie base mix and apply them or adapt them for use in winter.

Applying a base mix in various different ways as opposed to just in boilies for example has many benefits. Base mix based ground baits of many kinds can be used with various PVA products to deliver very loose and easily dispersed attraction in the water to pull fish to your hook baits in a more excited mode of behaviour; particularly in lower water temperatures and this also applies to slop and spod mixes and others too.

Open texture baits are obviously very good performers in cold weather. I am certainly not against using baits incorporating bread in winter. Of course there are very many bread based types of ground baits, stick mixes, method mixes and other baits. You can make cheap boilies for autumn, winter and spring that include bread crumbs along with other open-textured ingredients and use them pretty much as carriers for protein-rich liquids for example. Just using some garlic concentrate, intense sweetener and certain spice extracts for example will grab the attention of carp although many anglers will just go for their favourite flavour and a sweetener for example.

One of the bonuses of playing around with bread products in winter is that you can exploit fishing in various depths of water and specifically introduce free baits so they rise in the water or gradually sink or hang in the water to effectively tempt fish situated at different depths in the water column. As we know, carp are notorious for sitting within certain comfortable layers of water in autumn, winter and spring especially in spells of high pressure for instance. In this regard many more carp anglers are much more aware today that persisting with bottom baits or pop-up baits near the bottom in winter is often the wrong method to use when fish wish to be situated off the bottom for significant periods of time.

Especially stimulating homemade breads or cakes are great cold water edges when used on their own or used in combination with boilies or any other bait; but this is something I know very few anglers will even consider doing as it appears not to be fashionable. But I have proved this baits worth on countless occasions in my own fishing ever since my early days of baking conventional (buoyant) floater cake using homemade base mixes and readymade base mixes for example.

This is definitely a more unusual winter method to experiment with and I encourage open-minded anglers to try it! Using dog biscuits under water is a good trick but why not make your own baits that are totally unique with your own specific attractive alternative characteristics in mind?! For instance why not try fishing a homemade buoyant jelly based bait teamed with a floater cake bait for a really different winter option that I doubt hardly any experienced pressured fish will have had to deal with previously.

Sure fishing a bit of popped-up plastic corn near the bottom, or fishing a piece of black foam in mid-water can produce fish. But if you are looking for something a little bit different in a cold water bait and one that hold lots of attractive liquids then why not consider trying homemade buoyant cake! (For more information see my website and biography right now!)

By Tim Richardson.