I expect you are most likely thinking that this must be my year; that at last I am going to succeed and really get into those big fish I have been dreaming of! This exact kind of thought is the mindset that programmes you to succeed in fishing and I will explain why it works and how to harness it much further. You might ask who are you to talk about fishing success and all I can say is for starters is that in 2006 I decided to catch the world record carp. Subsequently within 9 days of fishing at Rainbow Lake I had hooked that specific fish.

My detailed technical preparations involving bait design, very unusual bait applications and formats used and very particular attention given to every single item of tackle chosen and sourced for this mission all paid off. But most of all it was the mindset and constant self talk which paid off. This heightened my awareness and sensitivity to everything I could possibly harness within my environment and own past big fish experiences and focused them all towards my goal.

Winter and early spring are times when you simply must be positive at all times and be at the peak of your abilities as an angler because being in such an alert frame of mind maximises whatever chances may be available. But far more importantly still is that with this sharpened mindset you will actively proactively create your own unique catching opportunities and competitive edges!

When you focus in as great a detail on every single aspect of your fishing challenge then this crystallizes everything at your disposal so it is readily available at your finger tips. There is a reason why top match men practice the way they do. Practice does not make perfect. The truth is that perfect practice makes perfect. I have fished with and beaten a guy who matched for the England Sea fishing team, using baiting tactics and technical strategies from my carp fishing.

I have also beaten a guy in catching some of the very biggest carp from a very hard lake. This guy match fished for England as a youth and was technically speaking among the most refined carp anglers I have fished against. I was able to out fish him by using adapted details of lessons learned from sea fishing and river fishing. You are wondering how does this relate to your own winter carp fishing I guess so I will expand on what I have just described!

What I did to beat these two obviously highly talented and experienced anglers was to use my mind to focus extremely intently upon everything that could possibly be relevant that I ever experienced, read, seen, invented, imagined, or intuited. This included every single thing in fishing I ever observed in the past and present, and my gut feelings about it all in regards to the present fishing situation and challenges in detail that this had. This mental focus is really what Kevin Maddocks was referring to when he wrote about having a positive mental attitude when winter fishing.

To be a sharp carp fisherman is not to have the latest baits and equipment, but to hone your mind shaper than anyone else! This is what Richard walker did, and one of the things that made Rod Hutchinson stand out and what made so many truly great pioneers in carp fishing do so well. In fact so many of these were so sharp that other anglers thought they were crazy, and Duncan Kay is a perfect example of a great angler and technical bait pioneer too that really had vision and  as a result in the seventies he was well ahead of the crowd!

Modern anglers today have mainly lost this creative mind power which assures great success. This is because most anglers are simply following the herd to a massive degree, and copying whatever fashionable baits and methods are the latest to be advertised or talked about in the carp magazines. I hope you can see how limiting this is to success!

For a start, using the same readymade bait as everyone else means you have just lost any competitive edge over them. But the entire point of bait is to be an edge, not simply over cautious carp but obviously over other anglers too. When other anglers catch your target fish on exactly the same readymade bait as you are using think about how much this drastically reduces your own chances!

I recommend that you use the winter and spring to seriously reassess everything you are thinking about your carp fishing. You have many blocks to your success which are actually caused by your own limited and out of date thinking. Carp are dynamically evolving creatures and every single one is constantly day by day individually changing on a genetic level, just like you! Many people do did not realise for example that your genetics are not fixed and that you are adapting genetically in response to the food you eat! I hope this makes you think!

There is no perfect diet! This is because every individual is unique in their genetic make up and details arising from this dynamic and every experience past and present an individual has. This applies to humans and carp equally. For example, a bait with an exact match to bloodworm amino acid profile may be invented that is in a format that physically fools carp. However, once enough carp are hooked on this enough times they will change, even to the point of avoiding consuming bloodworm totally.

Carp have evolved not merely to be acutely sensitive to potential opportunities for energy and nutrition, but also for threats and dangers from these. Not many anglers realise that the actual specific baits that they use directly condition carp to the danger that is associated with them. This is a big reason why I avoid using readymade baits!

I make my own homemade baits designing my own boilie recipes mainly using ingredients which are not used in readymade baits! It takes visualization and careful thought to do this and I do help loads of anglers achieve this very successfully. I do this because it works and because my greater satisfaction is in knowing my experiences are empowering other anglers to catch their dream fish! It has amazed me to discover that in fact doing this is far more satisfying than the highs of catching all the lake records and personal best fish I have over the past 35 years!

These personal catches are fleeting moments of ecstasy that is for sure, but these memories and feelings fade like photographs over time. But getting catch reports from anglers whom you have helped to catch new records using homemade baits on their water, to beat readymade baits such as Bait craft, Richworth, and Mainline etc, feels so fantastic!

So back to what you can control most of all in your fishing, and to positively creating your own detailed guaranteed success in advance!

The only place you can actually do perfect practice for fishing whether to win an international match, or to catch the biggest carp in your lake is to keep on doing perfect practice in your own mind! This is one thing I have a feeling that Terry Hearn for instance spends much of his time doing; far more than the average angler. This involves anything from location and fish behaviour patterns and feeding spots and how they change over time in a lake, to visualizing exactly how your target fish enter the swim, how they sample baits and respond to the presence of terminal tackle and baits on the bottom.

Spending far longer in a swim than average weekend anglers, days and days, you kind of become part of it, and get to know its secrets, natural rhythms, moods, observing and sensing everything moving, changing happening as day turns to night, and night turns to day, learning more and more about how and why the fish behave the way they do, and why.

For instance I learnt by experimentation, comparative analysis of set-ups and tackle arrangements with different lines and back leads, sinking tungsten tubing and more that it was important to pin everything down right from the rod tip on a water I fished for 8 years. Often the biggest fish in there would stop feeding if they felt any line or anything like it.

They developed a behaviour of spinning on line once hooked, and coming straight in giving you no resistance, and searching for another line to use as a lever to pull the hook out, and they did this immediately as close as the bank at you feet and that is no exaggeration, and I lost some near forty pound fish by them employing this evolved behaviour.

This is before I got wise to it when a few fish did this requiring me to exploit numerous back leads sometimes 7 or 9, which always made lesser aware anglers think I was mad. I also pulled my rod tips away from the edge of the water so only the first 2 rigs were over the waters edge. This had a hidden benefit too as by doing this I began to convert more single bleep bites as I had removed the buffering effect of having over half the rod sticking out beyond the buzzer acting like a great big shock absorber defeating the entire point of hook penetration!

Think about it and try it because I know you will have never seen this in magazines but it really does work, but use a line clip above your reels to establish that essential shock effect too! My best result of my own evolution there was a 46 pound leather only caught once previously. (It later occurred to me that it was probably an Essex record for a leather at that time in the late nineties though I never publicized the catch.)

You can get better and stronger and far more detailed in your fishing visualization at any time and any place; and not just in your bivvy! You can deeply detail visualize at home while making homemade baits, when making up rigs and when taking valuable hours manually sharpening your hooks well past the fineness of any chemically sharpened hooks! Very few articles have ever been on the mental side of fishing yet I make this point for this simple reason; every single action you take in fishing is a result of your mind and your thoughts and because of this your degree of success is totally in your own mind!

Perfect practice visualization of exactly the goal you have in mind hones your awareness and opens your consciousness to everything you need to improve upon and refine further and further until you succeed, so that success really genuinely does literally become simply a matter of time!

Perfect practice visualization is the most powerful thing you can constantly do in your fishing so I recommend you think about this! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!

By Tim Richardson.

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