SUMMER CARP BAIT TO CATCH MANY TIMES MORE FISH!
Revealed here is a taste of the powerful edges you can exploit to catch many times more fish, including far bigger fish too! Summer means raised fish activity, faster metabolism and digestion, and we can exploit fish behaviors through the manipulation of very special bait substances added to any ready-made bait or included within homemade baits. It is often not simply what you use but how you use it that makes a massive difference to your catch rate!
You probably use ready-made bait most of the time, but maybe hope to find little edges of your own to make them perform that bit better, or maybe you are keen to make your own homemade baits that will out-fish readymade baits. Most anglers use ready-made boilies or pellets for example in very similar ways in summer or winter. Most anglers seem to think like anglers instead of like carp and this is just one factor I have noticed over my 30 plus years fishing for big carp. Yet thinking like carp is the key to greatest success!
So how does this type of thinking produce the greatest success in terms of using bait and bait substances that make a far greater impact upon fish feeding and even powerfully conditioning fish uniquely onto your baits as opposed to competing baits? There is an angler who has promoted himself very widely in many angling publications etc named Ian Chillcott. He is an angler who is not exactly that sophisticated when it comes to bait, and what I infer here is that he tends to use ready-made bait supplied by bait companies and puts his faith in their knowledge, experience and insights about substances and how they manipulate and exploit fish sensory systems, and many other factors.
Many people follow this and other high profile anglers by copying their every word but the bigger picture is what really matters. Experience counts for much in fishing, but to put blind faith in something you do not truly understand is simply not the best route to the greatest results. You can put blind faith in bait and then never know just how much better you can achieve, even if your readymade baits appear to be successful! When an angler gives up using boilies and starts using maggots it is a sure sign they do not know how to make bait substances beat maggots, because after maggots have ejected their ammonia and have inevitably slowed their movements and drowned they have very little stimulation and attraction left to offer compared to a far superior purpose-designed homemade bait within reach of anyone with enough of the right knowledge as you will discover for yourself!
Most average anglers simply do not realize that they can catch at least 4 times as many fish if they truly understood fish externally and internally and understand far more about the fact that fish are literally bathed at all times in an electrically charged solution to which they are acutely attuned and are sensitized to tiny changes occurring which may offer a vast array of potential food threats or threats!
Any heated bait that breaks down into solution by perhaps 12 to 18 hours, 24 hours, or longer is not optimized bait at all. Think about it. Fish are surrounded by a multitude of substances in solution all the time. This may be regarded as smoke or background clutter that can mask the potential impact of many of your bait substances leaching from your readymade baits. For example, there is dissolved ammonia (ammonium) leaching from decaying leaves and other detritus (or chod,) there are minerals and so on in solution in the water that in effect turn lake water, etc into an electrolyte. This is important to realize as you can manipulate and exploit this in your own ways!
Then you have all the wriggling moving and living organisms in the water, perhaps zooplankton in the top and middle layers of the water, and of course all the various forms of algae that color the water and bloom in warmer temperatures, but which are the incredibly nutritionally rich basic food source of carp besides the minerals they absorb through their skin from the water surrounding them, plus other sources.
Many anglers doing fancy articles describing typical chod rigs and stiff rigs with perfectly round pop-up boilies in clear water tanks have most likely forgotten that in most feeding situations the fanning of the water by carp clouds the water in the immediate vicinity of baits. Even in the clearer water and over the cleaner gravel bottom of Horseshoe Lake, where the underwater Korda videos were filmed, you can see the fish feeding on the free bait clouds up the water immediately around baits.
Now here is just a little tip just to show you how to think like a fish and exploit this to your unique advantage. Thus far I have painted a picture of how fish live in a world that is constantly changing where the changing levels of dissolved carbon dioxide, (carbonic acid) and different levels of amines and other acids and alkaline substances, mineral salts and so on are all being detected by carp senses by all their sensory systems simultaneously. It is vitally important to exploit as many sensory systems as possible simultaneously in order to fully overcome natural fish caution, and doing this correctly in effect makes your baits addictive and strongly habit-forming.
I know of no ready-made bait that does this adequately, which is why it is possible for anyone to out-fish any ready-made bait by making uniquely potently active (and biologically active) unusually water-reactive, highly soluble homemade baits. I have been a field tester for many companies over the years, Rod Hutchinson included. I am a consultant for CC Moore and other bait companies so I have been able to develop some pretty deep insights into the actual comparative performance of ready-made baits and individual bait substances applied in a variety of unusual ways.
My specialty is homemade baits of very unusual and surprisingly creative formats and designs made very differently to those advertised in flashy magazines. Some of my homemade baits are extremely work-intensive and take layer upon layer of preparation and practical processing to achieve the desired active and bioactive effects on carp and desired optimum concentrated levels of bait substances in solution. I still have to find ready-made bait I cannot top in terms of the potency of impact by leveraging and harnessing water reactivity. Making baits react with water so that they impact on carp senses and biological systems in simultaneous ways to the degree that these completely alter fish behaviors and modes of feeding in your unique favor is the goal.
Carp respond and react as much to changes in the water that literally surrounds them, as much as actual stimuli in water intended to effect a change. I wonder just how many anglers really understand how various forms of the awesome fish feeding triggering betaines react with water. This is something very much worth discovering, and I have indeed written a 100-page book on betaines such is their power. The fact is that the electrical exchange of particles of molecules of water in reaction with any bait substance is critical to the success of that bait substance and the initial degree that fish feeding is achieved via external and internal sensory systems and other biofeedback impulses and stimuli within fish.
The second stage is how fish in response to detected stimuli release hormones, amino acids, etc in the brain and how these switch on moods and physical activities ranging from gulping of the water to full-on head butting of the lake bed, or even simply traveling 50 meters following the concentration gradient of substances becoming solution leaching from a baited area.
So many factors come into play in the bigger picture of how carp live and how we can apply all these in catching more fish, by thinking like a fish. I know you want a few tips on how to improve your bait performance. Many of you use a tub with spikes inside to crush boilies, pellets, and so on to make a coarse or fine meal or powder to use in your water-soluble bags and webs made from polyvinyl acetate. The use of powders in such soluble bags etc to deliver soluble stimulation and attraction to the water column is successful and that is well known and applied in action by many anglers today. However, I will question very seriously the actual potency of crushing boilies and pellets for this purpose.
The reason I question is very obvious and I hope that by now in reading this you have your carp thinking brain in gear and well and truly turned on! Boilies and pellets are machines formed and rolled or extruded and cut, then heated, maybe even coated in oils or soaked in glugs or dips. But the fact remains that these have been heated and will not form the most potent and most impactfully concentrated solution of stimuli in water. In effect, using the ground up boilie and ground-up pellet approach is a second rate method. It simply does not deliver maximum potential impact via the water column nor into a solution that will surround and envelope carp so promoting the most powerful feeding frenzy possible.
Heated boilies and pellets act in water like someone smoking a joint standing next to you. As the smoke rises and spreads, you can detect it via air molecules impacting your sensory receptors. But what I am talking about is surrounding carp in a cloud of stimuli that lingers and keeps being refreshed by further concentrations of solution around them, much like standing right next to a massive smoking bonfire surrounding you with smoke, or like being in the middle of a steam room where you are imbibed with the stimuli of burning coals and steam entering your pores.
I am talking about fish being surrounded by intense stimuli constantly and not simply being aware of a few plumes of attraction from scattered and soon washed out baits, whether spod mix, ground bait, boilies or pellets, etc.
The average angler expects miracles from the baits they use, because they do not understand them in terms of how water reacts with their individual and combined components, and how these in solution impact upon carp in multiple ways on a multitude of levels internally and externally.
Thinking like a carp involves imagining that you are like a swimming tongue. You are directly in contact with food signals via receptors packed in the skin on your face, your nostrils, lips, palate, throat, digestive canal, fins, lateral line, belly, etc. Most anglers seem to think of baits as something to be tasted or smelled, but carp are very different. They have an ancient brain, short digestive tract, and different nervous connection to different brain areas and so on, and operate naturally in stimulating solution and not in the air. Do not think like a human in the air but like a fish in the water. This is central to thinking about how to improve your bait.
