New baits are the key to consistently catching big carp because they will be treated with far less caution than any baits they have been hooked on previously! You might favor particle baits like peanuts or tiger nuts, or instant baits high in concentrated flavors or nutritionally stimulating baits. But whatever it is you can be sure that keeping them different to what has been used before is absolutely essential for consistent catches.

So if being new and different with your baits is the key to most consistently staying ahead of the fish and fellow anglers and making fish far easier to catch compared to over-used popular baits, how might you achieve this edge? The short answer is every substance you use to soak into your readymade baits or include in your own homemade baits has the potential to breathe new life into your bait and improve or prolong catches on it. This in effect turns your bait into a fresh new one which the fish may well regard with less caution.

To prolong the life of a readymade bait or produce a new homemade one, you have an amazingly diverse fishing bait industry offering decades of experience and field tested products proven to catch fish. So finding new products and combinations of them you can trust is easy. But there are literally thousands of products which can be exploited which are not usually used by carp anglers and theses often have potent competitive edges over the most popular proprietary ones on pressured carp waters.

Many anglers love to use flavors and others steer clear of using them. But one thing for sure is that the majority of anglers are only aware of a tiny fraction of forms of flavors and flavor substances and components available to use in our baits. The concentrated solvent based flavors so commonly used to change the smell and taste characteristic of a bait are a minor part of what you can leverage for great results!

Your bait will have a smell and taste even though it may have had no flavors added. Every ingredient you put into a bait has some impact upon it and bait ingredients do not work in isolation but together synergistically and this is how they affect fish senses and fish digestion too. Fish are totally aware of all this and can even detect the components of flavors in their instinctive search for potential food that might provide essential dietary requirements or simply an energy requirement; energy is essential for all life. Intrinsic flavors and smells exist in baits long after our own human senses cannot detect them. Flavors will act differently in air compared to water and this is very significant for example in regards solubility, use through the seasons and rate of diffusion of attractors through the water to pull fish towards your bait.

In the case of big carp, they can be caught on baits containing strong powerful flavors or minimal amounts or none at all. The angling fishing pressure they receive 24 hours a day will often influence which approaches and which forms of flavor are more stimulatory or more repellant! But even using rubber and plastic baits will eventually be associated with previous captures and be less effective for this reason.

It is obvious that nearly any bait will catch a carp once. Much of the reason fake plastic and rubber baits catch carp is the lack of suspicion aroused by them, compared to conventional round boilies for example. This often because they do not contain the concentrated substances carp can recognise and relate to previous experiences of getting caught, but even these baits are far from sterile, having natural and human hand added attraction too like butyric acid.

Out of the potential millions of substances you can exploit to make your bait different, new and totally unique consistently over time there are those which have been proven very successful, especially for the bigger fish and many are well known ingredients and flavors offered by bait companies. But there are of course many ingredients and substances not known by the majority of anglers which are either quietly being used by bait companies or not at all and many have yet to be discovered. We can use our own food ingredients as useful guides to what to use to enhance and differentiate our baits to improve results, as we share similar senses and essential needs as fish (albeit in very specific areas.)

Fish and humans share many of the same vital processes and body chemicals we need to survive. A familiar and popular bait additive today is betaine which fish and we use in digestive juices which is also significantly used to remove harmful products in the body. Betaine is one of those substances which is found naturally abundant in nature and which our and fish bodies extract from natural foods for a balanced healthy body. So it makes sense being abundant in our natural foods that our bodies can instinctively senses its need for it and our food detection senses code for this substance strongly.

In fact I focus on betaine because it has an even more intense feeding stimulation impact on carp sensory systems than the fellow feeding stimulator, the amino acid alanine. Most anglers already appreciate the impacts of amino acids upon fish feeding but do not relate this intense feeding response to hardly any other substances. But just in the same way that betaine and amino acids are significant growth and health and balance promoters etc, thousands of other substances have very significant bioactive effects on fish we can exploit in baits for big fish.

You can help your bait enhancing and bait making efforts enormously by looking at how the food we eat is formulated. The food industry go to great lengths to get substances in our food which make you eat more of it, even to the extent of training our taste buds with all that sugar, salt, yeast extract, and the vast number of other healthy and unhealthy additives hidden away in long ingredients lists. When I began writing books and articles many scoffed (please excuse the pun,) at my claims that there are many addictive substances to exploit for use in baits for big fish; just 2 clues are the capsaicin receptors found in carp, and the addictive effects of certain cereal gluten substances which release feel-good but addiction forming endorphins in carp brains! Fishing blends well with other outdoors recreation and sport activities like hunting, camping, boating and other such hobbies and but so knowing as much as possible about your improving your fishing baits will ensure you always have better results; guaranteed!

By Tim Richardson.