How to Make Carp Fishing Boilies For Winter Or Summer Good As Professional Readymade Baits!

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How to Make Carp Fishing Boilies For Winter Or Summer Good As Professional Readymade Baits!
By Tim F. Richardson

So you want an extra confidence boost in your winter (or summer) carp fishing and you want unique baits no-one else has ever used before? The following ideas for bait recipes revealed here will provide you with boilies, pellets, paste and ground baits easily as successful (or more successful) than the vast majority of better readymade baits - so read on to get this very rich information!

This method of making boosted readymade bait base mixes and homemade baits is not strictly scientific but your fish will not mind as it does include tonnes of very strongly decades-proven real catches based science in terms of the ingredients chosen!

Whole and soluble protein is a big part of this bait article, but this is just a fraction of all the reasons why all these bait ideas here work so well! What you use is partly influenced by the materials you know you need in your bait to affect fish in various significant ways in regards to sensory and brain stimulation to promote favourable behaviours that could make them easier to catch plus what you can personally source and your budgetary considerations. But please remember not to merely stick to using your personally skewed personal choices. Why not get much more creative than this; fish have very different far more acute senses compared to you! Add to this that they are sensing substances in water and not in air (which is an extremely important point to make,) so discover and use what they prefer and not merely what your taste and smell preferences prefer!

As a human, personally I would prefer the aroma and taste of fresh hot roast chicken juices as opposed to hydrolysed earthworm protein. But despite this, I know what the carp will naturally respond to more strongly to because I have actually tested both these substances! Note: Testing of individual substances is not enough - testing substances in actual baits in conjunction with other substances is the real test!

For instance, the extremely common natural amino acid proline contributes to the taste of many substances that carp and we humans instinctively are attracted to and our senses are sensitive to. But to use pure supplemental proline to stimulate carp feeding reveals they need to experience it within a very narrow band of concentration for it to be most effective so it is more complex to exploit it in sophisticated baits even though it works!

This is true of many substances including the use of betaine in boilies where just a minimum of 1 or 2 grams can improve results in conjunction with hydrolysed protein for example. In the case of many essential oils they can be used by measures of millilitres per kilogram mix and certainly not all essential oils need especial care where just a few drops too many can potentially ruin a bait. This takes first hand experimentation and experience. You can always bulk up an essential oil if you are in doubt with examples like hemp oil, sunflower or wheat germ oil and olive oil with mixed nut oil or pumpkin seed oil and garlic oil, orange oil and coconut oil etc.

Note: The use of traditional concentrated flavours (even if they are natural or nature-identical,) is not necessary at all with this particular set of bait ideas given here. This is because as you will see, each substance mentioned has its own intrinsic flavours, tastes, aromas and sensory impacts on fish. However very many anglers are still stuck in the rut of wanting to add an extra concentrated flavour just to give themselves added confidence by feeling they have given their bait a unique label.

Well designed natural baits do not need any label as such to dominate a bait and in fact such items can often make it easier for a wary carp to avoid baits containing recognisable labels! Just consider how many decades sweetcorn, hemp or luncheon meat had been used very successfully, before they were offered for sale to anglers with fashionable added flavours such as strawberry, Tutti Fruitti, banana, Scopex, pineapple and chilli etc?!

Note: All the ideas below can be used to boost or bulk out readymade base mixes and ground bait mixes of all kinds as far as you wish to experiment and refine your own new mixes and versions of them in creative ways. All these things are just examples and all can be removed and replaced in whatever ways you wish.

Using natural substances rich in feeding triggers carp naturally respond very strongly to is a guaranteed way to give yourself confidence in your bait and provide excellent nutritionally rich reasons for carp to eat your baits and be very enthusiastic about them! In this case firstly get some fermented shrimp powder or Belachan block. If you get the powder stuff get a kilogram of it to play with - the cost will be worth it believe me! If you can get the Belachan shrimp paste block instead, then you will need to break it down a bit by doing the following: simply grate it into a large pan and keep adding hot water until you have a nice runny slurry. In the case of the fermented shrimp powder, simply add hot water to produce a runny slurry.

It is easy enough to get a block of Parmesan cheese and grate it or get some pots of grated Parmesan cheese or blue cheese powder for instance, and add this to your slurry. Such strong cheeses are rich in proteins, amino acids, peptides and all kinds of other goodies, including natural form monosodium glutamate, butyric acid, mineral salts and many other things besides. If you wandered why such cheeses have very strong tastes and aromas - now you know! If you include dried tomatoes in your mix you will be improving the taste by including certain excellent bioactive compounds carp are instinctively attracted to plus raising the levels of taste enhancing glutamate in your bait.

Now get yourself a big pot of yeast extract like Vegemite or Marmite and mix this to your slurry - which is obviously getting thicker by now! Now add half a big pot of black strap molasses. Strangely the organic stuff is most often cheaper than the non-organic stuff and is usually a more concentrated gritty product packed with loads of minerals, vitamins, trace elements, plus other factors and let us not overlook its great betaine attraction! I find freshly liquidised garlic a great additive but fresh herbs and spices and fruit, vegetables among other things are absolutely packed with incredibly bioactive goodies.

If you can get CSL (corn steep liquor) why not add a generous helping of this too; the more active the better! I also like to use creamed sesame seeds too, so for example look for some Tahini. If you are American then creamed corn and corn syrup are obviously stereotypical choices just like Canadian maple syrup. You might try liquidised blueberries and ripe cranberries and mulberries for instance, or try pineapple, mangoes, papayas, strawberries and bananas etc. Maybe try Aloe Nectar or fruit syrups! A splash of Vodka is a nice touch and helps keep everyone happy! Your pan is now holding a goo of the type it has never experienced before. You can simply thrash it about with a whisk or fork or use a food blender if you want speed and efficiency.

Like I said previously, it is all down to you what you do, what you add and the amounts of all the things you might include. No it is not scientific and frankly to a great degree Mr Carp will not care as long as long as the ingredients, liquids and additives and other special stuff you choose to use have an excellent reason to be in there to stimulate carp in any of a million different ways directly or indirectly even if they has never been used in bait before! Now add on top of your special mix an equal amount of very fresh large hen eggs and whisk again.


You may have been asking when this stuff is going to resemble something other than goo. Now get yourself a big packet of wholemeal flour. Put it into a bucket and add a liberal dosing of icing sugar. Again take some yourself to help the process along. Any ordinary breakfast muesli can be added too and original Alpen is a good one although something like Jordan Country Crisp is one I like to use as it contains loads of addictive goodies and I speedily crush mine down into finer particles in a bucket using the end of a sledge hammer.

Why not add a tub of dried milk powders or a tin of condensed milk in with your liquids. If you happen to have a health store nearby or a body building friend or use EBay etc, then you can easily get the following 2 ingredients: Many bait companies stock this and other goodie; Calcium caseinate (often called Casilan) and lactalbumin or use whey protein powder. I like using linseeds like Holland and Barret product which has added lactose and I also add all kinds of seeds, from sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds, to millet and canary seed, hemp seed and crushed nuts. If you are a fish meal nut then add some fish meal. Adding LO30 will be a good idea although I know of certain hydrolysed protein ingredients that equal or even better this stuff (and some very enzyme-active and will self-digest your bait more for even better results!)

Anyway, the amounts you use really are up to you, some baits and amounts will be more successful but if you write down all your ingredients and levels and ultimately record the exact bait mix of every test batch you make you can replicate it easily enough so all your best ever baits can always be repeated - and still be secret to you alone!

All you need to do is mix up your dry ingredients extremely well so they are equally distributed in the mix. You powders and liquids will mix together to form a dough or paste which you can use straight away or store or make into pellets or boilies. Always start off with a small batch to test it. This way you can see if it binds how you like and maybe rolls how you like if you want standard boilies. By the way boilies do not have to be rolled into round balls at all! I dispensed with using bait guns or paste extruders, and binned bait rolling tables years and years ago as I simply do not see any advantage today in making perfectly round boilies and I am well against this stereotypical, completely unnecessary boring out-dated practice that can actually make it much easier for wary carp to avoid getting hooked!

Always add your bait powders to your liquids when mixing them. Making your mix slightly damper and wetter than you think you will need is a good thing because you will be well advised to let your ingredients sit and soak up your liquids for at least 12 hours in a sealed heavy duty plastic bag in the fridge. Doing this also kicks off all kinds of synergistic beneficial reactions within your bait. Always make a small batch first to ensure it is OK in terms of the practical consistency you want either for use as paste straight off or to make pellets and boilies or ground baits etc.

If you want to make ground bait using your mix then why not ensure it has loads more bits that will give it life and will easily separate and move away from the mix it being of a much courser consistency?! In the case of ground baits you can go overboard on the liquids and forget the eggs for binding. Many great ground baits can be made by simply mixing your powders at the waterside with your liquids prepared and bottled up ready to add. I find that if cost is an issue, then using a number of reduced price loaves that are easy to break into crumbs make an excellent addition to any boilie or paste base mix type of ground bait. Bait movement and vibration stimulate fish so good things to give your ground baits added life are live foods like worms and maggots although the potential list is enormous if you really do your homework and want to get far better edges!

None of this stuff I have said is new and is well known in the bait making community to differing degrees of use and significance. But the very best stuff does not come for free and I could tell you lots of much more advanced stuff but in laymans language to give you fantastic results. Carp bait making is made easy if you delve further into what is healthy and cumulatively or instantly addictive to the carp internal processes and internal and external senses!

Bait secrets really do exist and there are far more yet to be revealed than any of us can imagine I can assure you. For one thing I am certain that the electromagnetism of certain bait recipes and forms is extremely significant just as the ways that leads, hooks, swivels, plastic tubing, rubber corn etc all impact on carp senses in water.

It should be pretty obvious that it is not just bait companies that know and can exploit bait secrets. Many bait secrets can come from fields totally unrelated to baits or the food, pharmaceutical, aquaculture or pet food industries or whatever. I wonder where the idea for using glass micro-balloons in pop-up baits came from. Was it from someone working within the surf-board or boat-building industries? How about all those bait secrets used today that come from glue manufacture and design, cleaning and homecare products, or from cosmetics and skin care products and developments, (and so on?!)

Many secrets about stimulants or depressants can be found in the history and developments of the various religions all around the world. Just ponder Christians and their wine, Indigenous American Indians sacred ceremonial herb smoking, or south American Indigenous Peoples vanilla oleoresins, coca compounds, cannabinoids and other substances in hemp for instance or even tea catechins!

Indigenous American indian peoples considered maize and sweetcorn as food from the Gods; it certainly became a vital staple carbohydrate source just like barley, buckwheat rice, potatoes and other carbohydrate sources used by ancient peoples switching from hunter-gathering to farming cultures ruled by seasons and new devices to measure time that we call calendars. I often wonder what the world would be like if we in the western world had not used the year and seven day week system established today!

I was born in February so things like leap years remind me what an hilarious artificial framework and synthetic reference point of human culture and living patterns such things really are! If you think about it time is also a very artificial thing because you can never be at exactly the same time in any one place technically speaking; especially as you and everything else is moving so fast; what an illusion. It is a bit like gravity; it becomes a weaker force as you travel away from the surface of the earth - but you would never know this just by standing on the ground looking up!


Incidentally, how many carp anglers think about the possible implications of water pressure on carp and carp tackle as carp go deeper and deeper - and are such things significant?!

Another thing that you might have noticed is that reproductive cycles of so many species get influenced by electromagnetic forces including hatches of insects for example which are proven to stimulate significant carp feeding. But how much do carp change their feeding and other behaviours in response to these subtle forces that we just overlook. The tides change, the moon rises and falls and the earth revolves around the sun; but how much do we carp anglers care and should all this influence our choice of bait substances and formats?!

I stopped wearing a watch years ago because everything is about relativity and context! But if I did wear one I think the version I would use would be this: It would be a single hand watch showing Mickey Mouse in the centre facing the ten to ten position where the hand would always be fixedly pointing up from the centre!

Many UK carp anglers consider sweetcorn a gift from the carp God via Fred J. Taylor who popularised this bait in the UK and has sadly passed on. I still recall the very first carp section I read in a book by Peter Stone (which dates it somewhat!) In it Fred J. Taylor wrote that as far as terminal tackle for carp is required (after your obligatory strong 10 pound line,) all you needed was a hook - and nothing else! This was an early writing as the bait he recommended was a par-boiled potato with the hook fed into the potato using a baiting needle. This is the exact way I started out carp fishing with a 5 foot long cane rod (and free-lining still works today of course!)

I look back fondly on the real carp fishing pioneers. My early carp fishing memories are filled with romanticism and nostalgia. They are tinged with the taste of excitement of suddenly stumbling upon an overgrown and long forgotten carp pool that has been un-fished for years along with quotes from BB, Richard Walker and Mr Crabtree echoing in my ears! Did you ever notice the similarity between the old paste-balanced crust tactic and the apparently new snowman rig which we were using back in the early Eighties?! Look out for the old stuff because the principles still work and can be re-manifested using modern ideas and newly-available bait substances and new technological materials!

Similarly in music it could be said that everything has been done before considering the limited number of basic notes used (excepting the newest computer-generated ones!) Yet new popular music is made all the time using the same old notes and chord progressions dressed up in different styles and images etc - but they just keep on working!

Today the modern reality is that anyone can discover bait secrets for their own use and also find new ones too that constitute great new edges over competing baits and fish senses! In New Zealand I found it a fascinating wake-up call to be told that potatoes starch is a very popular binder used in carp baits. Corn starch is big in the States and wheat starch as found in semolina is very much a stereotypical bait ingredient in Europe! Personally I am not prejudiced about avoiding semolina and I use good old soft wholemeal wheat flour and whole wheat a lot (and it is a great cheap and effective ingredient for winter baits!)

In fact stewed corn and fermented corn has been and still is a very good carp bait; why should tiger nuts, maple peas, buckwheat or cracked corn get all the glory! Not long ago I watched an old guy catch a good twenty pound carp on a boiled tinned potato on a slow relatively unproductive day. This just proves that any alternative (or original mainstream bait) is well worth a try, and keeping an open mind will catch you more fish than a rigid conventional bait and method approach!

Protein-rich gluten as found in carbohydrates for example, is a very interesting area of study; the commercially-available version of the taste enhancer monosodium glutamate is predominantly made from the fermentation of wheat gluten. It became popular in America apparently after American soldiers realised that their rations of spam for instance did not taste as good as captured Japanese rations which were enhanced using monosodium glutamate! Apparently gluten is an important part of many fish diet formulations in aquaculture. This also relates to commercial butyric acid production and protein fermentation for example. (No-one can deny that butyric acid is not a significant food and bait enhancer!)

OK now onto suggestions on influencing carp behaviours in your favour by exploiting bait substances. Do you consider that you are the only species that releases feel-good hormones such as serotonin when you consume certain food substances?

You are releasing hormones all the time that influence your growth, feelings and behaviours all the time. Have you noticed how steroid using body-builders can actually grow permanent breasts as a side effect? What about sex change women who take the male hormone testosterone to alter their characteristics?

What about women in the menopause who take supplemental oestrogen to help prevent demineralisation of their bones. Study the seahorse (a sea fish) to find out some very strange behaviours in regards hormones and adaptations for survival! Carp seem to like the estrogenic impacts of things like evening primrose oil for instance; I think this is highly significant!

Someone in a Carpworld article said not long ago there is nothing new in carp baits -but obviously that is utterly misleading! I am interested in the truth and ongoing new developments. Hopefully that ex-railway worker will move on and get real! At least I have a scientific background in plant research and commercial horticulture, plus relatives with medical and science doctor ships and professorships from Oxford and Cambridge (to help keep my mind on real possibilities not egomaniacal judgements!)

Now why not consider this: Carp naturally release many forms of hormones all the time that massively decide their natural behaviours (and their more artificial conditioned behaviours when they are stressed by being fished for!) These releases can be either in your favour so making them much easier to catch or not - and your bait is a very big deciding factor in fishing situations!

Just for one example, you can directly manipulate and exploit the influential release of particularly helpful fish hormones by using good bait design! Therefore I advise you to become really expert in learning about carp (and catfish for example) themselves, before you rush out and get lost in the myriad world of bait ingredients, nucleotide enhancers, protein sweeteners, flavour development processes and components etc. (See all my other information which will help you understand carp and influence their behaviours big-time in your favour!)

When you know what turns carp on and why this is vitally important in revolutionising your own results, you will never again feel lost in the worlds of readymade baits or homemade baits! In fact you will be able to keep on producing endless new effective very economical carp (and catfish) baits of standard and completely new formats, incredibly quickly - for life! (For more information see my website and biography right now!)

By Tim Richardson.

Now why not seize this moment to improve your catches for life with these unique fishing bibles by Tim Richardson: "BIG CARP FLAVOURS FEEDING TRIGGERS AND CARP SENSES EXPLOITATION SECRETS!" "BIG CARP AND CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" For these and much more now visit: http://www.baitbigfish.com the home of the world-wide proven homemade bait making and readymade bait success secrets bibles!