Making Cheaper Homemade Carp Bait Mixes For Boilies, Pellets and Pastes!

Many carp anglers need to economise on their bait because though it is an essential item the costs really add up. One proven method to get great catches, economise on bait costs and personalise your bait to catch even more fish is to bulk out readymade boilie mixes and ground baits. Read on now to cut your costs in half and race through the bait making process by cutting many corners to make your own very competitive effective baits that are totally different to standard baits!

Carp anglers are mostly a lazy bunch so we are drawn towards cutting corners which is a big mistake for the majority which tend to copy other anglers corner-cutting and merely end up with average results to show for it! Using readymade baits is so prevalent today that the arts of personalising your baits to make them more effective in many diverse ways has largely been lost to the majority of carp anglers.

But get this: The rewards of mastering homemade or home-adapted baits can be genuinely shocking despite what even some higher profile anglers might say about their usually prematurely ended pitiful attempts at making baits for themselves. Many anglers even justify their laziness by saying it takes too much time or effort to make their own baits so they use readymade baits missing out on all the benefits and vital competitive advantages they were so close to having!

I will make a big statement here which will underline how wrong the dominant perception of making baits is: You can make extremely successful baits without spending hours making baits that look or feel anything like commercial readymade baits. This fact is one of homemade baits biggest competitive advantages over readymade baits that most pressured carp are masters of avoiding and have been practicing dealing with for 24 hours a day for years and years!

What I consider to be another gigantic advantage of making your own baits is that getting into bait actually helps you sort out the readymade baits that are the most ideally suited for various specific fishing situations, thus clearing up all that unnecessary confusion so many carp anglers have about bait. But not just this, getting into bait enables you to understand bait enough that you can determine how to take advantage of other anglers application of popular readymade baits - and top them!

Many anglers get the incorrect impression that making bait involves loads of equipment and is a messy long drawn out process that takes hours, but this is a completely out-dated impression! Bait making fashions change and the ways to make baits are various and exclude steps that people used to take for granted that they thought they must do - like rolling baits! I have not used a bait gun or bait extruder or bait rolling table since about 1991 since I reached the age of reason!

Before that time much of my fishing was done over crumbled boilies with very open textures to release stimulation and attraction very quickly over a wide area so it did not take too much exertion of the old grey cells to figure out that making round boilies only to crush them was a total waste of time and effort! Thinking out of the box by ignoring characteristics of very standard readymade and homemade baits really improved my results. I cut out loads of steps thus enabling me to make my bait like lightening and I have caught loads of fish on these different format homemade baits and I have never looked back since!

In fact I avoid making round baits completely and I apply in this grouping barrel shaped and pellet shaped baits because I believe in most lakes the shape advantage they may initially have had over round baits is long gone! Have you ever noticed just how frequently fish will roll over freshly introduced perfectly round readymade baits and avoid hook baits more than you would like. Of course looking at the big picture, because so many anglers are fishing it looks like round baits or barrel shapes are winners but they are definitely not the most competitive shapes not bait formats in all situations.

The same loss of competitive edge with standard shaped baits has long ago occurred with large sized marine or halibut pellets. On the fishing pressured carp waters of today it does not take long for the popularised mass use of standard barrel and pellet bait shapes and formats to reproduce the kind of fish caution you would expect with readymade round baits.

So why not think about things a little more deeply and you will soon see ways to achieve edges over fish caution and many are simple, quick, easy - and totally free! Are you doing things and using things just for the sake of it because it worked 3 years ago and because you have become attached to it? Is what you are doing even more effective now than 3 years ago - because that really should be your aim simply because this really is possible. To Mr Carp the only time that matters is right now because that is where he has evolved to, but he has experienced and associated with many baits and methods and substances a lot along the way that programme his caution so it is good for us anglers to keep adapting too!

Although many carp anglers will consider designing their own homemade baits or adapting readymade baits and base mixes for many different personal reasons, many do not do very well for a very significant reason. That is that it seems to me that they usually get excited about recipes and ingredients choices first. But this is before they often even consider the much more vitally important aspects of bait design and bait application etc in regards to carp sensitivities and knowledge of carp internal workings. This knowledge and understanding really are extremely powerful things to have in staying ahead of your fish (and competing anglers!) Things like watercraft and casting skill, abilities to fine-tune rigs and correctly apply bait in different situations are things anyone can develop over time given practice but what use is it all if you cannot understand why your readymade baits do not work despite your own best efforts?

Far too many carp anglers have pure blind faith in their baits and therefore miss out on much better catches due to ignorance of how to change how they use them, or how to boost or alter them to maximise various bait effects and bait application impacts of many kinds in pressured fish situations.

The potent advantages of being able to do these things is that your bait really can become a serious leveller when fishing against very cautious fish that supposedly have seen everything before, and gives you loads of edges against anglers who maybe have more time or experience on a water or have other competitive advantages!

Here it is wise to once more remind stuck in a rut anglers that beginners luck in terms of new anglers on a water offering new baits and tactics etc most usually produces so-called beginners luck in the form of big fish fast! This beginners luck might simply come as a result of noticing things about the fish and their responses to baits and adapting of baits and baiting that rusty regulars have over-looked because the way they have been fishing created that fish response (or non-responsive) situation in the first place!

It is no coincidence that very many of the leading match anglers design and make their own secret ground baits and pastes and they in many ways have refined bait making just as highly as carp anglers. In the UK it seemed an inevitable convergence that match fishing and carp fishing would eventually meet of course just as in the States!

In the States making homemade baits for winning carp matches is an extremely serious aspect of fishing yet still to this day the average carp angler in the States appears to think of a carp bait as a lump of corn dough. In answer to that, all you need do is see how digestible corn flour or corn meal is and how many vital reasons or non vital reasons carp have to pick up such baits and then compare these to other bait substances. The result is that you find corn baits are well short of maximum potential success - just like the old semolina and soya type baits!

Anyway, you can find all kinds of readymade boilie base mixes and ground baits you can use to begin making your own homemade baits as a basis to start to create your own unique creations. Genuine quality carp ground baits contain many additives and ingredients that are used in boilie production and the lines can get blurred in this respect as quite a number of carp ground baits make effective boilies too.

Many boilie base mixes are more expensive than others usually due to a large degree to the cost of the expensive protein ingredients they contain. But although proteins and amino acid sources and peptide sources form part of the reasons why carp baits can be very successful, other elements can also attribute to success. Some factors in bait do not even need to have anything directly to do with nutritional attraction at all and this is a very important fact in a world where baits are competing for the attention of carp.

Many anglers would like to make their own boilies and the ranges of choice of them has much expanded as have the variously differing formulations. I will not push you one way or another in terms of choosing base mixes because over the decades I have found that it turns out almost any old rubbish can be made into a paste and steamed or boiled to make baits of some degree of success. I have occasionally bought up old stocks of base mixes from fishing shops and bulked them up and adapted them with great success. Just ensure the powders are still freely running in the bags and you have not evidence of holes, splits or other contamination and excessive aging of the contents!

Much of the time you can bulk out expensive readymade mixes with cheaper ones although this is a hit and miss method, your results will soon tell you when you have found a combination that is really good and a very good price! Mixing boilie base mixes within a range or from different companies may frighten both the bait designers and some bait makers, but I find carp do not read the same books and instructional labels as us any often respond very well even if only because the bait is so unusual!

But there are other ways of cutting your costs too. You can mix a boilie mix with a cheaper ground bait mix, or mix a costlier base mix with some very well chosen ingredients. I find that bulking out boilie base mixes to reduce costs is very effective, but you need to take care you know what kind of effects doing this will not only have on the effect of the formulation of the mix and impact on the impact of finished baits but also how it will most probably impact upon the performance of the bait when in water and in contact with fish senses and while being digested, plus other variables that can be altered.

Happily carp are generally able to give you pretty immediate feedback to tell you if your test mixtures are real winners or merely average catchers!

I mention test batches because it really makes sense to field test small cost-effective batches first before committing to larger volumes of bait as this way you can really sort out some winning combinations at a much cheaper price and know with absolute confidence your budget bait is an outright winner - even against the original base mixes it might be fished against!

Like I said a bit earlier, there are endless things you can use to bulk out your base mixes with and they can very between extremes of being more expensive and really pack an immediate punch for instance, or be very cheap and act more as liquid carriers and binding materials. Just a few examples of ingredients I like to use to bulk up base mixes include brewers yeast, lactose coated linseeds, CLO, skimmed milk powder, whole wheat flour, oats, crushed low oil economy carp pellets, and various other ideas that would surprise most people but which are very effective indeed because they provide very significant effects in carp that they really find attractive!

Exploring substances that seriously impact on carp senses and provide noticeable beneficial internally effects within carp is the area of bait that gets me most excited because there is more to carp baits and their formulation than has been accepted by most people over the last 50 years. Winter may not seem like a good time to test baits yet I find that more and more anglers are fishing short sessions today to fit fishing into a busy life style and testing new baits in winter is very quickly rewarded - sometimes instantly and I say this from long personal experience of testing totally new homemade baits in winter.

To say there is nothing new in carp baits is staggering ignorance. Just in the last decade new research and new patents and newer processes and product applications plus new products are being made available outside of the fishing and aquaculture industries for example. Today totally new applications and sources of potentially great bait substances are appearing offering genuine competitive advantages in fishing!

For example, has a successful mouldable fibrous paste been made available in times gone by? Just how many new hydrolysed protein products have been made available and then applied to carp fishing baits over the last 20 years?! In fact there are very many things you can do with your baits that can promote more confident or even more aggressive feeding between specimen fish. You just need to think out of the box and consider what carp feed naturally on, how they feed on it, where they feed on it, when and why. The answers to any of these question and others can produce an edge in your bait making and vitally, your bait application so that you really maximise the potential of your baits.

Having had the luxury of at times being able to use not only my own homemade baits, but commercial baits and substances in the testing stage or further adaptation stages, it is very noticeable that new baits really do catch fish successfully unawares because they are new - and therefore they offer a slightly different experience to wary carp! This might sound simple but it is so true! How many times do the biggest fish in a lake get caught soon after a new bait is used on a water?!

Another example of applied thought about how the various modes and ways and senses that carp use to feed has been expressed in the present availability of luminescent flavoured bait dips. These attract sight feeding carp. To thinking anglers it is very obvious that carp often feed in very low vision conditions in turbid clouded water on the bottom for much of the time. In most waters just having a carp root about an area clouds up water around the head of a fish.

Luminescent baits assist the location of hook baits in the night in the day in turbid conditions or at depths that little light penetrates to! I believe the idea for one particular light-emitting dip came from the knowledge of light-emitting proteins (among other substances) that fish and other organisms detect within their aquatic environment. (Some of these things include proteins found in aquatic creatures that are utilised for various purposes in a totally natural light-emitting liquid crystal state for example.) Note emission of light in nature is caused by many various substances and effects vary from short term bursts to much longer durations.

I recommend that you become much more of a student of carp than a purely habit-driven follow the leader type fisherman. You will reap big rewards especially when it comes to bait because this vital aspect makes catching fish if not merely a lot easier, but can avoid for you so many unnecessary and unwanted blank sessions (that all cost you invaluable time and money!)

It just takes a little thought and understanding of carp themselves plus a willingness to apply your own creative ideas and be different to normal to achieve outstanding success! (For much more information see my unique website and biography right now!)

By Tim Richardson.