Making your own homemade baits is one of the best ‘edges’ left to fishermen who dream of big fish! There is no doubt about its success over the decades and it is something which is easy to do for anyone prepared to give it a try. Many successful fishermen find making and using homemade baits is addictive; but why? Let’s find out...

Listening to the pigeons cooing in the roof like mad and to the constant droning lawn mowers breaking the stillness in gardens all around me, all day long, reminds me I need to get out fishing again!

The temperature today in my part of the UK East Sussex was 18 degrees Celsius.
I feel that the time when temperatures are touching 12 degrees regularly during the day and nearing double figures at night is the time to get fishing big-time if winter fishing is not your thing!

The water temperatures are fast catching up with air temperatures. As a result, the carp metabolism is speeding up – how exciting after such a mediocre slow winter for sport! It is estimated carp need about 15 percent of its biomass in food at 15 degrees Celsius.

On some waters in the past at this time I’ve absolutely hammered them. The period between fish metabolism ‘waking-up’ and the first spawning of the year is one of great feeding activity and is now more significant in my experience now, than the old October final feed, which seems to have been spread over September now instead!

One of the keys to starting to fish in the spring is getting the fish to regularly find your own unique bait regularly, preferably at least 2 times or better still better 3 times a week. I knew a guy who fished a small water regularly; in fact he was the bailiff. Despite certain advantages of this like having use of a boat for feature finding, swim preparation, baiting-up etc, there was one thing he did not realise for a few years while I fished there.

He did not regularly bait-up the same spots regularly, over a period of time. Instead he just turned up, set-up and baited-up wherever the fish happened to be showing. The one time he did bait-up a bit, he did it in full view of other anglers in a spot they could all fish from various angles. Not surprisingly he discovered the other anglers all benefited from his efforts and he actually stopped bating anywhere altogether as a result, which was extremely short-sighted considering the benefits!

In contrast, especially in spring and new waters, I’d aim to fish purely to fish for ‘liners’ and locate new favoured feeding spots which may have appeared since last autumn. Often it is obvious if you know the water with new dips or hard spots formed, or entire areas transformed. Some formerly good areas on autumn may in spring have a layer of new sediment and ‘chod’ which has changed the nature of the area. Old bloodworm beds and weed beds may have taken a ‘hammering’ too. Some areas of lakes can get ‘grazed-out of natural food by the carp, or simply put-off a previously productive swim by fishing pressure. There are great advantages finding new spots.

1. It’s very likely at least initially that few anglers will locate them if you know what you’re looking for.

2. You can regularly bait the spots and get fish confidently feeding on your bait without getting hooked and set them up for a productive haul of fish.

3. The pressure on your spot will only be from you if you are crafty about not letting others know and see exactly where you are fishing.

4. Often an easy way to locate a new spring feeding spot is fish those areas you know have been little fished over the last 5 years. Gradually over a few weeks of baiting and fishing, perhaps with no result, the fish will often make an appearance as if by magic! (They are often very easily conditioned!)

5. You can often get multiple fish ‘hits’ out of the ordinary results anglers in the popular swims get.

6. You will often hit into some of the biggest fish in the lake not used to being hooked on that spot or area of swim and therefore more liable to slip-up more often there.

7. Fish are very keen to exploit a new food source in a new spot which does not represent a threat to them in terms of with past angling activity, hooking or capture associations! Finding or creating new spots is often tough to start with but extremely well worth the effort and one of the greatest hidden edges you can create for yourself in fishing for big carp or catfish.

One of the cheapest and easiest ways to get bait going in and establishing or exploiting a new feeding spot initially, is by using soaked and cooked seeds. I sometimes use wild bird foods, trill, hemp and a few other goodies which might form part of the hook baits and larger freebies used. The good thing about soaking and cooking these small seed items is that when gelatinised they are far more digestible and as background feed actually help digestion of any other baits you may use from boilies, to pellets, meats, pet foods etc.

Spring is a time when any bait goes. You can have hits on sweetcorn, tares, maples, black eyed beans, luncheon meat, chopped and whole worms, maggots, and very many other baits besides. The great thing about boilies is their ability to be selective for bigger fish, something which often over-used pellets often lack, more commonly producing lower twenties as opposed to numbers of big thirties for instance.

One year on a water, I baited big-time with marine pellets and for about 6 weeks I ‘canned’ the place with around 70 twenties and 12 thirties in 6 weeks. Eventually I had to adapt the taste, oil, betaine content and even colours to try to keep fish coming. Altering the rig dimensions and types helped, but it was obvious that the fish were feeding far more in more careful ways than at initiation of the new baiting. Going down sizes of pellets, fishing crushed ones and mixed sizes and types only worked to a certain degree. So did scalding the pellets and using straight pastes.

What I really wanted was a string of big thirties again, not 5 twenties in an evening which though a fantastic result for the water was frustratingly not what I was spending all my time and money fishing and baiting!

Making boilies is not as big a deal as some may think. In fact over the 30 years I’ve been making them, roughly 80 percent have caught well enough despite many mistakes and abandoned trials and experimentation baits. But that 80 percent success rate is probably the figure for most people who start from scratch without a clue and scarce little help from very secretive fellow anglers! When I say ‘boilies’ I do not necessarily mean the familiar hard round ball types either, in fact far from that format as possible to create as many ;edges; as possible!

The fact is that any new bait ‘worth its salt’ will catch because it is new and beginners luck reigns supreme with such baits. In the 2005-6 seasons I had 14 individual forty pound fish with 9 individuals plus a couple of lake record catfish on beginners luck. Now what I mean directly by this illustration is how anyone using a new bait applied correctly can have big catches of fish and you do not have to be the world’s sharpest carper to do it either! (I’m a very lazy angler once my baiting location and full preparation has been done...)

It is very easy to ‘blank’ when you go fishing by ignoring the advantages of having your own unique baits. If you are an average skilled and experienced anglers using baits that other anglers also use on your water, it is inevitable that the more skilled or experienced anglers will most likely catch the most fish and bigger ones at that! So why settle for mediocrity when ‘red letter day’ catches are easily within your reach?

An easy tip is to put your baits in pre-heated flasks after boiling if you choose to boil as opposed to steam them. Using your baits hot has many productive advantages; I urge you to try it! Such baits will significantly diffuse your baits attraction and stimulation far more effectively in cooler water temperatures for a start!

One thing I can say is that any single aspect of your bait can overcome a fish’s caution and induce it to actually hold your bait long enough in its mouth for it to produce a ‘bite.’ It may be ‘feel’ or a single liquid coming from it, or even the smell of the base mix itself nothing at all added. (Everything has some innate taste even polymer plastic baits and natural rubber baits; your hands provide added ‘extras’ too!)

It may even be complete absence of the more readily recognisable flavours, additives and ingredients in your bait that make it so successful. There are scarce few ‘scientific absolutes’ in homemade bait making. There are guidelines and simple principles to keep you on ‘the right track’ or at least a conventional track. Many very highly experienced American carp fishermen do not subscribe to the high or ‘balanced nutritional value’ theory at all.

I’m in agreement that if you are a skilled and experienced angler you can catch as many fish on single ‘instant’ highly flavoured baits as so-called food baits with balanced amino acid and other nutritional feed triggering profiles etc. I use both schools of thought and forms of baits at various times each with very good success, so the choice is yours.

Yes I have made plenty of mistakes, but it’s all priceless feedback and the learning curve never ends! Some anglers love to use flavours, others who know less about their range and capacity and biological benefits of various flavor components tend to use little or no flavours in their long-term nutritional baits.

But there is no right or wrong; just what catches fish on any particular day – and on most pressured big fish waters, every day is different and changeable. (You may notice this especially if you fish 3 different flavour baits on 3 rods for long enough; the catches frequently change from one bait to another over a 24 hour period.) Different rigs will often produce more fish on different days; car and catfish for that matter definitely learn about our baits, tackle and fishing activities even sometimes right from the moment we close a car door at a fishery and bombard the earth with vibrations from a fully loaded tackle barrow! (Food for thought?)

When you know far more about making your own secret recipe baits your confidence and catches will really soar. Not only this but the satisfaction of catching a string of ‘personal best fish’ caught on your own homemade bait is just an indescribably joyous feeling! You can make your own boilies, pellets, ground baits, special ‘method mixes’ ‘PVA’ bag and net mixes, ‘stick mixes’ and ‘slop mixes.’ You can even make your own extremely effective ‘alternative’ flavours, bait dips and soaks from both naturally derived and other easy to get synthetic or nature-identical sources!

Making new additives and flavours using combinations of proprietary carp or catfish baits has the added bonus that you already know each product works individually and finding new combinations can easily intensify their effects. (You can intensify and enhance the flavour and impact of your baits amino acids for instance, but also very simple easy things make such a huge difference to catches!)

Being able to fish ‘single baits’ beside another anglers old bed of bait and just know the fish will not be able to resist testing your bait is just awesome! The example of Frank Warwick’s fluorescent baits might give you some idea of what you can do, but with more bait knowledge there are things you can do with these to improve their effect where they’ve been used many times before.

But the fact is, he’s obviously done more experiments and also had far more successes and failures than most anglers ever dream of risking, but the rewards are obvious. Not only this, when you know more about manipulating flavors and their components substances, you can often get far greater numbers of fish in a session as a result and have more ‘instant hits’ of fish at new venues...

Knowing these will make you both a far more adaptable angler in changing situations and seasons, but will give you far more reliably consistent big fish results which can be reproduced on widely different waters from poor quality more acid ones to the richest of alkaline top waters like Redmire and others like it.

A massive bonus is you will be able to manipulate, enhance and ‘top’ the predominant baits on your water thereby getting everyone else to do your baiting for you! Now how expensive is that just for a little reading!?

This fishing bait secrets author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges.’ Just one could impact on your catches! 

By Tim Richardson.

For the unique and acclaimed new massive expert bait making ‘bibles’ ebooks / books: “BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!” And: “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” (AND FLAVOR SECRETS ETC) SEE:

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