You can improve your catches instantly by taking the step of trying new things, trying new combinations of things you may already know work and trying things you do not know work or not. Remember it is the things that carp have never regularly experienced previously that mostly catch those dream catches you hope for, so here’s a few perhaps familiar and unfamiliar tricks you might try with your baits to stimulate your catch rate! Soak your baits in a dip; whether meat, nuts or particle baits, pellets, boilies dips and bait soaks work!
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 anglers under-exploit their readymade baits they use because they have a relatively impervious surface. You can break-up this surface with a baiting needle, or sharp pointed knife or scissors to get more attraction out of your bait. Making your hook baits irregular shapes with irregular surfaces helps by making fish think your bait has been previously chewed on by other fish and so is safer.
Try coating your baits with a dough or paste. This does not have to correspond to the hook bait you use at all; it could be you use a red fish meal boilie coated with a yellow bird food paste mix. Or tiger nut coated in shrimp paste, or luncheon meat coated with aniseed flavoured ground bait based paste.
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.
You can add cork granules and other very light or buoyant ingredients to make it float or hang in the water off the bottom or silt or weed for instance. Imagine the advantage of using a buoyant paste around a bottom bait or semi-buoyant bait and how frequently your fish will have had to deal with this! Using buoyant paste around bottom sinking hook baits can seriously save you blank sessions!
You might liquidise your readymade baits and mix with eggs and a little wheat flour or other glue-like ingredients (caseins and caseinates are extremely effective containing high protein levels.) This way you can fish a conventional bait which has an unusual coating which is alternative but different and closely matches your hook bait; there is no doubt about it that fish learn and experiments with goldfish performing tricks using food rewards like dogs shows the 15 second memory is just a myth - carp learn! So do yourself a favour and try being different with your baits especially as it is your the bait that truly hooks your fish and the more you know about bait the more power you will have over your fish!
By Tim Richardson.