Past Tense

Stimulating your fish to feed makes them much easier to catch! The ways of doing this by leveraging the power of your bait has multiplied vastly in recent years, and many things have changed, leading to bigger catch results for many more anglers in the know…

Often when studying bait and why it works, scientific tests utilise baits of gelatine and casein, but natural food is not present in tests and this is very important because it shows how many variables exist in real life fishing! Carp are evolved to digest natural food items they have found in their environment for eons of time, but angling baits need to be designed to be not only most nutritionally beneficial and digestible, but most potently stimulating to feeding too. The energy and nutrient requirements of carp in regards to baits we exploit are vitally important to us anglers because these can really boost our short-term captures and multiply cumulative catch results over time very significantly.

Carp feeding stimulation involves many carp senses in a combined way; so why not exploit as many as possible to maximise our baits, after all; (baits do not merely work by exploiting nutritional stimulation but many other factors too!) We can take into account real life fishing variables such as the way carp exploit various natural food sources as the season progresses and this will impact on bait design and bait recipes, type of baits used and how they are applied on the hook and introduced as ground bait. When fish are very much orientated to feed upon natural organisms then this too can be exploited by good bait design, and we can exploit and manipulate the presence of natural organisms by using our bait to deliberately attract these too.

How things have changed in carp fishing since I began in the 1970′s when most carp anglers caught single and double-figure fish and a carp weighing over twenty pounds was very special indeed and a thirty pound fish was a fish of a life-time and something of an object for closer scientific scrutiny! Where a can of luncheon meat or a loaf of bread used to catch carp, now many anglers will throw into their swim a couple of thousand boilies, many kilograms of pellets or particle baits and still expect to catch without waiting a week for all this to be cleared before getting a bite. The impact of the general trend towards use of more bait as free bait, chum or ground bait is often to do with improving angler confidence, but it can very much improve fish confidence too and when done appropriately seriously multiplies catches.

In the UK, there was a time a few decades ago when it was estimated that the majority of the fish weighing over twenty pounds existed in relatively few waters located in the North Kent area and having lived there myself, numerous villages there are certainly reminders of many famous carp waters from the 1970′s and early 1980′s period. Anglers starting carp fishing in the last 10 years certainly have great difficulty imagining just how much harder it was to catch fish of big twenty and upper thirty pounds going back even a couple of decades. Big carp existed in much smaller numbers in the UK and in only a relatively select handful of waters and this is why personal best fish of leading anglers in the 1970′s and 1980′s were so much smaller than those of today!

It is funny to think that once upon a time catching twenty individual twenty pound carp in a (UK) carp season fishing from June to March was a very tough goal, even up to 2 decades ago on most UK waters. But I know for certain this can be achieved in under a week on the right UK waters today. Bait know-how does make a great difference to potential results without doubt.

One 1991 milestone catch for me was of 23 carp caught over 5 days from an Essex reservoir, topped by the biggest in the lake (a mid-thirty,) and these fish averaged just under twenty pounds each; this provoked much jealousy from other members at the time, yet today such catches are pretty commonplace. Unique homemade bait design and regular effective bait application was the secret to my milestone catch back then and probably applies even more so today! Bait is often the last consideration today in the age of the instant carp angler who can buy everything except experience, but getting educated on the secrets of bait and how to exploit its power is a very big edge that can make your catches far better than ordinary, (even if you are a carp angler of average talent or experience!)

Bait design is very important and the nature of the free baits you use in order to get fish into an excited feeding state and drawn into your swim, hopefully to make a mistake with your hook bait is crucial; even in exceptionally prolific French and Spanish waters where 60 fish of over twenty pounds has been achieved by my friends in just 3 days. In the UK high-profile anglers are very much promoters of innovative baits and applications and the leverage of various bait substances and forms of recipes is a very big part of their ongoing success. Bait is important not merely as an edge in itself but as the whole basis of your ongoing success and so belittling the subject is rather missing the point that carp senses can be manipulated in our favour over and over again big-time…

By Tim Richardson.