Discover Boats

A thought-provoking piece about carp baits, nutritional stimulation, improving fish weights, and much improved catch results!

The scientific information available on essential dietary needs of carp most often does not take into account the presence of natural food in the presence of a test food item such as that of milk casein and gelatine. In fact it really makes a big difference when you consider that a carp is fully designed to fully digest and utilise its natural food items as opposed to an artificial food item composed of many foods such as in a boilie bait or pellet designed for salmon, trout or even specifically designed for carp! The actual energy and nutrient requirements compared to the actual biological conversion and energy supplied may well not be as great nor as efficient as thought by anglers.

Many anglers think about their baits in terms of nutrition but really miss the other points about actual feeding stimulation processes and mechanisms. In the real world, what if you have raised the level of natural food organisms available because of the abundance of fishing baits fed into a lake? What if the fish can pick and choose whether they actually need fishing baits to supply any needs at all at any particular point in the year?

When I began carp fishing in the 1970s a couple of cans of luncheon meat or sweetcorn, or a pound of homemade boilies, ground bait, paste bait or a pint of maggots or a loaf of bread would have been easily enough bait for a successful 12 hour trip. Now it is easily possible to introduce 1000 boilies upon arrival and get a fish hooked within 10 minutes on some waters. It seems very obvious that the use of more bait (despite far higher stocking levels,) has affected feeding behaviours at certain times of the year especially during the colder months.

It is true that the majority of the fish you could fish available to you prior to the boom in carp fishing in the UK were of double and single figures and it has been said that at that time there were as many twenty pound fish in Kent waters as the rest of the waters in the UK put together. New carp anglers in the UK today could never fully appreciate just what an achievement catching a twenty pound carp meant back in the 1970′s and early 1980′s; and the opportunity to actually fish a water that held a thirty pound fish was incredibly exciting experience! To many carp anglers fishing just a couple of decades ago, the first challenge was actually to locate a water containing any big carp over twenty or thirty pounds at all, and it might seem crazy to consider that to me it was once an exhilarating thrill to fish a water containing fish over twenty pounds, now having hooked a carp over eighty pounds a couple of years ago.

Not so long ago the capture of twenty carp of over twenty pounds in a season was a milestone few of even the top anglers had achieved. It is astounding to me today looking back, that you can catch twenty carp of around twenty pounds or over on certain UK waters in just a week or less; and this is very much due to the impact of the highly nutritional free baits applied by carp anglers over recent decades. Correct bait application is a massive edge which simply cannot be underestimated but is often extremely under-rated!

One 1991 milestone catch for me was of 23 carp caught over 5 days from an Essex reservoir, topped by the biggest in the lake (a mid-thirty,) and these fish averaged just under twenty pounds each; this provoked much jealousy from other members at the time, yet today such catches are pretty commonplace. Unique homemade bait design and regular effective bait application was the secret to my milestone catch back then and probably applies even more so today! Bait is often the last consideration today in the age of the instant carp angler who can buy everything except experience, but getting educated on the secrets of bait and how to exploit its power is a very big edge that can make your catches far better than ordinary, (even if you are a carp angler of average talent or experience!)

Bait design is very important and the nature of the free baits you use in order to get fish into an excited feeding state and drawn into your swim, hopefully to make a mistake with your hook bait is crucial; even in exceptionally prolific French and Spanish waters where 60 fish of over twenty pounds has been achieved by my friends in just 3 days. In the UK high-profile anglers are very much promoters of innovative baits and applications and the leverage of various bait substances and forms of recipes is a very big part of their ongoing success. Bait is important not merely as an edge in itself but as the whole basis of your ongoing success and so belittling the subject is rather missing the point that carp senses can be manipulated in our favour over and over again big-time…

By Tim Richardson.