Scientific tests on carp feeding and nutrition often involve protein-rich foods based on casein and gelatine, but you have to ask how many of these tests involve bloodworm, zooplankton, algae, mussels, snails, all forms of insect larvae and aquatic weeds fish etc that fish thrive on. Such natural food items are easily detected by carp due to evolutionary adaptation through millennia and carp can derive maximum nutrition from these foods and digest them very efficiently indeed, and we can exploit all this in our bait use and design! We can certainly improve our catches by exploiting not only the nutritional impacts of natural food items and their profiles of stimulating substances, but by how we apply our baits and manipulate natural carp feeding behaviours also!

When most carp anglers think about baits they most frequently think about flavours, protein or other nutritional aspects, but very many miss all the other aspects of bait that induce carp feeding behaviour and curiosity etc, in general. One important variable factor in our fisheries is the changing levels of the abundance of natural food items present which can impact upon catches on baits very much at certain times and we can exploit this to make catches easier with more focus on ground bait and bait design. It can be tough to induce natural feeding carp to eat our baits unless we truly exploit the biochemical systems and other senses which carp use to detect their natural food so effectively.

When I look back to my early carp fishing days of the 1970's I recall using a bucket of ground bait made from bread crumbs, perhaps cans of sweetcorn or luncheon meat or various special pastes, particle baits like wheat, pearl barley, hemp or live baits like worms or maggots. In the last 30 years carp fishing has exploded into a highly commercialised activity, and today introducing many kilograms of boilies, pellets or particle baits among others, all produce fish. Having seen someone catch a forty pound carp from a UK water, just ten minutes after introducing 20 kilograms of soluble pellets into his swim (done under suitable circumstances,) made me appreciate even more how heavy baiting can be truly decisive in many big and wary carp captures!

When I look back to the 1970's and 1980's, often carp catches composed of single and double figure fish because much of the time was spent fishing waters that had yet to grow fish to over twenty or thirty pounds. It seems mad that today on the right waters, you can pretty easily catch perhaps 5 twenty pound fish in a day plus many other big double figure carp, when 25 years ago such a catch would be the total for a successful season on the vast majority of UK waters! Because bigger carp simply did not exist in anywhere near the huge numbers and exceptionally bigger sizes found in UK waters today, it is very difficult for those newer to carp fishing today to imagine just how incredibly hard carp fishing used to be in the UK.

Not so long ago the capture of twenty carp of over twenty pounds in a season was a milestone few of even the top anglers had achieved. It is astounding to me today looking back, that you can catch twenty carp of around twenty pounds or over on certain UK waters in just a week or less; and this is very much due to the impact of the highly nutritional free baits applied by carp anglers over recent decades. Correct bait application is a massive edge which simply cannot be underestimated but is often extremely under-rated!

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!)

In France and Spain, anglers I know have caught sixty fish over twenty pounds in just 3 days by good homemade bait design and application. High profile anglers like Terry Hearn, Julian Cardiff and Dave Lane understand the power of effective bait and its correct application. Its a proven fact that discovering more about bait generously pays you back big-time in both unseen and very obvious ways...

By Tim Richardson.