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Making Homemade
Carp And Catfish Baits - For Beginners!
By Tim Richardson It’s exciting and fun to make your own bait. So why not and go fishing and
catch fish on your own bait! It adds a special great feeling of
satisfaction to your catches! If you’ve never made your own bait, before
it can be like a door of new possibilities and potential being opened wide
for you. You’ll discover there’s no going back!
A dough, paste or boilie bait will catch many different species of fish
and very big ones at that. They are very easy to make too, although more
advanced baits designed to seriously select the biggest fish are very
often able to catch you far more fish overall than just a ‘basic’ bait.
A bewildering variety of different ingredients, additives and flavours can
make your baits more attractive to individual species more than others.
Let’s look at the basics of making a bait that will catch you catfish or
carp but many other species too!
Most dough, paste and boilie baits are made with eggs as a major binder
substance to bind together usually dry flours, meals and powders to form
the bait dough. ‘Boilies’ are simply dough baits boiled in water for a
short period of time enough to make a protective surface on the bait to
make it last longer and be thrown out at range to ‘free bait’ swims at
range.
They do not necessarily deter small fish, but normally ensure you have
your hook bait intact when you reel in your rig after it being in the
water for a number of hours.
The main question I get is about how to make a bait bind and roll well.
This is because your bait needs to last long enough in the water to
survive attentions of ‘pest smaller fish’ while waiting for bigger ones to
eat your bait.
‘Rolling’ is about the making of usually round shapes for dough baits to
be boiled, but boiling is not always a necessary procedure by any means.
In fact I recommend not boiling baits to wherever possible as this
actually locks in perhaps 70% or more of the initial bait attraction which
by definition really needs to be water soluble for fish to readily detect
and respond quickly to.
It is funny to notice that having boiled baits and even destroyed much of
the initial attraction nutrition and soluble effect of the bait, that many
anglers now have to soak them in extra soluble liquids, additives and
flavours etc, just to make them do what they would do far better when not
boiled!
Making a basic bait:
To begin with the first principle to make a dough is always add dry
ingredients (as a combined single powder, gradually mixing them into the
combined mixed wet ingredients including eggs.
Always write down the amounts of ingredients in your first batch mixed to
make things very easy and quicker to repeat successfully.
For example, crack 4 large hen eggs into a bowl. Whisk them up with your
chosen flavour and sweetener, perhaps 5 millilitres of strawberry flavour,
with a tablespoon full of honey. By adding the dry powder, a large spoon
full at a time to the liquid mixture gradually, you can see exactly how
much dry powder mixes with your liquid so you can make this stage very
quick subsequently.
The level of dry powder mix to liquid mix can change between different
ingredients used in different mixes because their absorbency or solubility
will be different, so it may take more or less liquid to mix into a bread
like dough for bait making.
So you see how keeping note of exactly what you use really helps,
especially when your bait really catches lots of fish and you want to make
another batch! (This even goes as far as which shop or supplier all your
ingredients come from; it pays to be consistent with these details.)
The easiest way to make a dough bait or boilie mix is to purchase a
proprietary one in pound or kilogram weight from a commercial fishing bait
supplier. These are usually in dry powder form and mixed with water, eggs
or other liquids to make a bait dough. You can trust that this bait mixture
will bind together, roll into baits for boilie making and hopefully catch
you some fish!
Proprietary ‘base mixes’ suitable for carp, catfish and many other species
have often been formulated using many years of experience. Using quite
sophisticated ingredients, these baits have normally been thoroughly
tested over a long and successful period by ‘field testers,’ before the
refined product is released into the market place.
The big drawback of using proprietary baits is often you do not know
precisely what ingredients are in the bait, in what amounts and ratios.
This might seem unimportant, but if you are targeting big fish, this
knowledge and how you exploit it could be crucial. The best rule of thumb
for good baits of any description perhaps, for a beginner’s bait, is to
pack them with high levels of liquid protein amino acid supplements.
These can be purchased from chemists or drug stores and are used for body
building in drinks. Fish have essential requirements for certain amino
acids and many of their most essential are supplied in abundance in these
supplements. There are many proprietary forms starting with ‘Minamino’ and
bait suppliers have various different versions at many concentrations
often with added oils, flavours etc.
This supplement is most effective when soaked into your bait after
boiling. In the case of dough, I would add as much as possible, for
example making your dough with a 50 – 50 percent mixture of eggs and
‘Minamino.’
Some of the simplest dough mixes are of ordinary white flour with an equal
amount of ground up sausage meat, or trout pellets, or ground up dry dog
biscuits or canned cat food or fish for example. These combinations can be
used individually or added together to make them more complex baits.
To each of these combinations just add eggs and your sweetener at perhaps
5 millilitres per 4 large eggs and perhaps your flavour and away you go.
If your bait is too wet, just add more dry flour. Added semolina, maize
meal or ground rice is commonly used as an added binder material. If your
mix is too dry, just add more eggs with sweetener and flavour if desired.
One thing about pet foods is they are very cost effective, are designed to
make animals very much want to eat them and are often very highly
nutritious and complex balances of essential nutrients and food groups of
essential dietary ingredients, often with added enzyme or bacteria to make
them more attractive and digestible. Ground up bird foods make excellent
baits on their own with added eggs and sweetener. Often the cost of a
flavour is not necessary at all for good results.
The key with baits very often is the ability to ground bait your swim
regularly sometimes even with very large quantities of bait, either in
advance or while fishing. This helps your fish recognise your bait as food
and really gets the smells and attraction into the water to pull in the
fish. This has a massive impact upon your results, especially for catching
the bigger fish.
If the bigger fish are your thing, them far more involved bait components
and more complex design considerations can really guarantee results more
than basic baits like these.
The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every
single one can have a huge impact on catches. (Warning: This article is
protected by copyright.)
By Tim Richardson.
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