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You can improve your catches instantly by taking the step of trying new things, trying new combinations of things you may already know work and trying things you do not know work or not. Remember it is the things that carp have never regularly experienced previously that mostly catch those dream catches you hope for, so here’s a few perhaps familiar and unfamiliar tricks you might try with your baits to stimulate your catch rate! Soak your baits in a dip; whether meat, nuts or particle baits, pellets, boilies dips and bait soaks work!

Oil rich dips and those rich in amino acids are outstanding and can come from simple homemade sources like tinned tuna oil mixed with liver pate and garlic salt for instance. Or maybe try shrimp paste with diluted fruit cordial juice and yeast extract; you do not need to spend a fortune on readymade dips or soaks etc. Don’t boil your hook baits; steam them instead to allow far more nutritional attraction and stimulation to release into the water instead of being sealed inside and largely wasted!

Coating your baits in even simple paste or dough bait certainly increases catches. Because most of the stimuli which incite fish feeding are water soluble, it is sensible to get many soluble attractors in your paste for best effect! There are many feeding triggers in fish and using mashed tinned fish like tuna, anchovy or salmon to make paste to go around your hook baits is easy; just mix with eggs and wheat flour or with ground dog mixers to bind!

Many readymade baits have a surface which does not maximise their fish attraction in the water and it is important to break their surfaces to achieve far more takes. By making a boilies or pellets surface more irregular you can improve attraction leakage from the centre of the bait and fool fish into thinking your bait is safe, having previously been tested by other fish chewing on it! Using sharp scissors, knife or baiting needle you can easily improve the catch potential and attraction of your baits!

I bet you never tried coating all your free baits with paste as well as your hook baits. You could try fishing a red fish meal hook bait with a pink liver paste or a meat based bait with a fish based paste; just experiment with colours, flavours and any kind of baits together! Even coating particle baits like smaller pellets or tiger nuts with paste is very worth doing!

You might like to try using paste around buoyant baits like pop-ups. Your hook bait and paste covering do not need to be like each other to produce great catches; in fact far from it! The method of coating a pop-up bait with a very different dough is a huge edge and is very well recommended!

Many ingredients can be added to a paste or dough to make it buoyant or float and cork dust or granules are one example. Fish can be fooled into taking buoyant baits because they counter-act the weight of the hook and rig material among other beneficial effects. I’ve caught many big fish by using this approach but using buoyant paste hook bait wraps and often fish can come surprisingly quickly to this method!

It is a commonly held angling myth that fish do not learn, but in truth very many species can be conditioned by angling activities, bait introduction etc and even koi carp can be trained to take baits from out of a keepers hands and be in a particular place in advance of feeding time! If you think carp do not learn just consider that over time when repeatedly hooked by anglers, they do not get easier to catch but harder! It’s just the same with hunting of other kinds. For this reason alone it is definitely in your best interests to find out as much as possible how to maximise the impact and effects of your hook baits and free baits because a trap is only as good as the bait!

By Tim Richardson.

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