Discover Boats

You pay a fortune on bait hoping to catch lots of big fish and yet the average carp angler is just that – average, because he catches no more fish than the rest. This literally means something he is doing or thinking approach just is not working. Most anglers simply throw money in the bin in bait costs etc because they have missed something so very vital to success!

Most often carp and catfish anglers use boilies, pellets and hemp, maize and sweetcorn and prepared commercial ground baits, as free baits to attract and hold fish in their swim. And these are obviously consistent baits for fish like carp and catfish. But often the hidden (or obvious) problem, is that you end up with many fish gorging upon your free ground baits and not getting hooked at all, or comparatively little, compared to the feeding activity going on in your swim. This happens far more than anyone is really accurately aware of and is a more truly shocking thing when you calculate just how much of your bait is consistently going to waste…

There is no point spending money to feed fish unless perhaps you are a fish farmer! If you keep on doing what is not working most efficiently and expecting different results, this is akin to the common definition of insanity. Carp and catfish are living dynamically reactive creatures and really do remember and associate with dangerous baits, rigs, spots in swims, tackle detected and so on.

Even hard-fished for big catfish as well as carp can become particularly unresponsive to popular baits and techniques even though they may have been so successful previously! So how do you save all this wasted money on bait used in free baiting and actually improve your catches by converting your baiting into more fish, consistently; because that is the big issue here! You see it is not just bait costs which mount up through the year, but all the associated but increasing costs of fishing; like time not earning, travelling costs, food and drink money, fishing memberships or tickets, the huge regular costs of replacing all those fishing tackle bits etc!

Making your bait money equal more consistent catches in the short and long-term will certainly save you money in results terms per pound or dollar spent as less is actually wasted. Yes there are fisheries which are so easy a bare hook catches fish, but I’m referring here more to fishing hard syndicate waters, or the popular fishing pressured and over-crowded day-ticket waters where fish respond negatively to anglers baits and fishing pressure. How do you know what you are missing if all you do is measure your results compared to the average catches for a water, when the reality is that the average catches on a water may be very different indeed from what is truly possible for any individual angler?

Many wary fish on pressured waters will not feed on fresh baits put out as free baits, and those that do may even feed in far more alert modes of behaviour in order to detect dangerous hook baits more easily. If you got hooked each time you ate something your confidence and behaviour in eating something you desire is obviously going to change because such food is potentially it is a threat to your survival, despite when baits being designed to promote fish’s survival and you might wait 3 days or more before eating the leached-out baits! (It is a well-known fact that fish will feed far more confidently on bait that has been washed out as few anglers hook fish on such baits and so the associated danger of such baits is drastically reduced!)

Many anglers on pressured waters introduce their free baits into a swim upon arrival and then after leaving fishless perhaps after 48 hours, another angler comes along and again introduces fresh bait in the same swim; mostly with the same fishless result! Looking at the bigger picture, this kind of thing must go on constantly all over the world on pressured carp waters. Of course over time the fish might eat the old baits gathering in the swim with more confidence and Mr average angler times it lucky and gets a surprise fish result while being oblivious that he’s fishing over other anglers build-up baits. But sometimes the gathered bait can all go off and kill the swim completely (again, this is something Mr average angler may be completely unaware of as he proceeds to bait up, again…)

When carp fishing becomes an automatic function of relatively thoughtless actions, the results become mediocre and this is no surprise as so many anglers simply underestimate the sensitivity of carp to angling baits, tackle, and all the kinds of active and inactive presences of anglers they detect so easily; what worked previously is not guaranteed to work today! On pressured waters each day can find the fish acting differently as you might do in order to consistently stay one step ahead of a predator, (and sometimes this is one example of why man evolved being able to be self-aware, rationalise problems and think of solutions, but this is vastly under-used in fishing!)

I am lucky enough to have caught a rare very pale white 38 pound carp that had not been caught in over 7 years, from one UK water. In this instance it took the regular very unusually light style and frequency of baiting a swim, with a totally new bait to that water and for a week long period, that scored (and this big fish was followed by many more as a result.)

It took new bait attractors and rarely used feeding triggers in (new concentrations and combinations,) plus new baiting approaches, methods and applications to catch that very special fish which was followed by numbers of other good fish proving the effort of though even more worth-while. But there is something on every water to exploit that defeats the natural and angler-trained conditioning of fish responses and reactions to what you do in order to catch them. Being different even in one single way or combining new, adapted or new combinations of old ways etc can all achieve what just going through the motions cannot!

If you take the time to analyse the short-term and long-term impacts of what other anglers are doing on your water and link that to the negative (or positive) impacts on fish behaviours over any time period, you may begin to see how to exploit both fish and angler behaviour creatively. This thought is unique to your fishing situation at any point in time so will most likely produced the most accurately tuned possible actions, processes, thoughts and actions to solve the particular fishing challenges present. By analysing your fishing challenges and fishing situation in regards impacts of your fishing (and of other anglers) upon fish really can means you can save a fortune in wasted bait; as what you do use is leveraged with far greater results in catches in relation to money spent on bait achieving these!

To leverage the true power of your baits does take a little extra effort on your part but that effort is never wasted! But I hope this article makes you think a little more of further possibilities the next time you bait-up, as usual… This bait secrets ebooks author has many more fishing secrets insights and bait edges available and just one could impact very significantly on your big fish catches!

By Tim Richardson.