A bait edge for many carp anglers means all too often simply buying a new expensive ready made bait. But you do not need to do this when you can easily make your own homemade liquids to adapt and boost them to differentiate them from every other bait your carp have ever experienced – so achieving more bites from warier often older and much bigger fish! So read on and discover how to catch more (cheaper) big carp now!

When you read the magazine articles or advertorials you so often find a high profile angler raving on about what is or will become the next big thing, the must-have additive that will change your life. But why bother with these when everyone else is going to use them when surely the big point of bait is to put fish at ease to get them to make more mistakes on your hook baits, not scare them by using what everyone else has already hooked them on!

You might be all too aware of the high publicised additives such as halibut pellet oil, tiger nut oil, salmon oil, and hemp oil etc.

But just consider for a moment how frequently carp come into contact with free baits and hook baits of so many forms that contain these. Most frequently just one individual oil is used in a bait so it is very easily distinguishable to carp and may well put them on there guard far more than a new substance will!

So how do you make a unique substance that works really well? The options are so vast you would be amazed. Oils vary in just how miscible or not they can be with other substances and to the exact degree they will actually mix with water and other substances. Sometimes it depends on temperatures and amount of time applied to the mixing process as well as other factors such as solvents, surfactants or lecithins etc. There is a fraction of oil that does mix with water in special ways even if only tiny and the same goes for oils mixed with very different substances.

I discovered over 30 years ago that when mixing homemade base mixes very wet that I came up with unique liquids and runny pastes that I could apply to almost any bait to make it completely unique. Getting back to oils, all you need to do is literally experiment with mixing ones you might know are popular. But there is far more advantages in using oils and combinations you simply will not find offered by any bait company.

The quick list of the most popular oils include various plant and marine oils plus others. The list includes fish and other marine oils of various origins and grades, herb and spice oils, vegetable oils such as those from seeds and nuts and fruit oils from berries and citrus fruits for example. There are very many others that will really give you a great edge against all those over-used ones!

If you are on a tight budget lazy you might simply add sunflower oil and mixed nut oil or peanut oil together and add a proportion of liquid lecithins to the mixture. The one from Carpfishingpellets and CW Baits is a very potent form and is like a thick viscous treacle and contrasts highly with some from other bait companies which basically look more like glycerine and are clear and far thinner.

In my special bait secrets ebooks series I really go deeply into things like making bioactive natural flavour-induced oils and even include a table of substances that mix together to what degree including things like sugars, terpenes, oleoresins, amino acids, essential oils etc. Just to be a little different you might add salmon oil to halibut pellet oil, or add garlic oil to hemp oil. Note; the tinned tuna oil that some high profile anglers have raved on about is well over 90 percent sunflower oil which happens to be very healthy but is not the same as pure tuna oil which cost a lot more!

Adding vegetable oils to marine oils is a very beneficial thing because you can achieve a balance of nutritional factors. The ratios of omega oils from 3, 6 and 9 all have various impacts on fish and you have probably read on tins of fish like tuna about the benefits to your heart and circulatory system of omega oils. In long-term baits this ratio is very important and impacts on lipids levels within the body of fish when fed regularly with baits.

Of course there are very many oils you might have heard of like the fish feed-inducing oils, Nod Oil, Nutrabaits Complete Food Oil, and Lee Jackson Ming Oil and so on. But very often either the price is extraordinarily comparatively high and you can make your own much cheaper oil mixtures to match these or the fact is they are already in widespread use and fish may well be wary of them! (Please keep oils refrigerated and avoid any oil oxidation which may harm carp – this includes using less than totally fresh pellets too!)

You might decide to use cheap roasted sesame seed oil or wheat germ oil and add a few things to really make these very different. You might go for cod liver oil or krill oil which is a specialist highly potent antioxidant supplement and an extremely powerful oil – one of the most powerful in the world. Coconut oil is a very nice oil too and again it has outstanding well proven antioxidant benefits. I mention antioxidant benefits here and especially in regard to anti-inflammatory properties of oils as very many great carp bait ingredients, liquids and additves have similar impacts when consumed by the fish and apart from being feeding triggers they actually wean fish onto baits so the fish begin to seek them out but for not just for instinctive health benefits!

Mixing oils is easy but so many carp anglers overlook this edge. I always use a liquid lecithin from my good friend Phil at Carpfishingpellets which is a nutritionally-stimulating feeding trigger and potent emulsifier of oils that improves bait performance and digestion and is a great price too!

Oils are addictive but if you happen to not believe me; just consider how addictive oily crisps and chips are; the salt just enhances what attraction is already there because the body is instinctively drawn to the most energy-efficient food sources and oils are at the top the list although I love to use sugars in carp baits for similar related reasons among others! (Note; every single cell in our and carp bodies is truly self-intelligent and DNA is not necessarily a fixed static thing and it is well-proven that consumption of sugars changes DNA.)

I noticed at least one fishing match has been won by a boy using micro-waved chips! Like us humans, carp are extremely sensitive to the energy-efficiency of their food. But then this is no surprise when you realise that we are the long-lost descendants of ancient teleost fish; of which Cyprindae fish are a part. Oils are very definitely one of the greatest sources of energy for carp in carp baits although oil levels in baits should be kept very low at a maximum of around 5 percent only. Amino acids and protein digestibility factors etc have quite some bearing on the balance of the impact of baits in the long and short-terms too (as well as carbohydrates significantly,) but this get out of the range of this article, but carp process amino acids to a massive degree better in many ways than humans, who by contrast derive far more energy from carbohydrate food sources than protein ones. (The thermogenic impacts of protein in carp baits is a very important aspect of bait design that can be exploited.)

Needless to say carp and humans essentially require energy sources simply in order to breathe and stay and maintain our body functions to actually stay alive; oxygen is part of the reaction with food energy that makes metabolism so important. (This is related to temperature of water in carp in contrast to our highly developed bodily temperature regulation in us warm-blooded humans, but this system actually robs us of energy too so is does have disadvantages compared to carp!)

Catfish love halibut pellets because apart from pre-digested fish protein for instance they are high in oils. But these pellet were designed for fish with much higher lipid requirements and most sea fish and salmonids such as salmon and trout need more lipids or oils and energy requirements than carp do. The emphasis of low oil marine proteins and low oil boilies is obvious as more and more carp anglers become aware of the health implications of using baits with too much oil content. I hate it every time I catch a big carp which has been damaged by the excessive use of oils. Many carp anglers still glug their free baits in excessive oils which is completely irresponsible.

Many carp anglers completely overlook the already significant oil content of their base mixes and unfortunately it is most often the oily fish meal type baits that get the oil glugging treatment. Just so you realise this in terms of the future longevity of our big fish stocks, high-oil halibut pellets and high oil salmon pellets and others are a big cause of fatty protruding livers bulging out of the sides of carp!

The same goes for fish like wels catfish whose rate of metabolism rises much more per 5 degree increase in temperature than carp; in the States in air temperatures around 100 degrees various catfish species really feed well but can you imagine the effect of such temperatures on carp?! There are very powerful reasons why mixing oils to gain not just uniqueness of smell and taste and nutritional benefits are great but other factors too. These are varied but include the ways certain components of oils will impact upon the physiology of carp and other fish, even to the extent of altering mood and behaviours significantly.

Just for example peach and strawberry oil, cranberry and citrus oils have very interesting bioactive effects and these can be added to other oils easily to differentiate them. Palatant oil complexes are a useful starting point to mix with various other oils ensuring the range of enhancers, and varied types of feeding triggers are in your mixture and exploit various internal and external carp sensory receptors simultaneously.

Various receptor cells exist all over carp from the fins, barbells nostrils, flanks and lateral line etc, to inside the roof of the mouth, in the lips and throat and deeper still inside the digestive tract and even in parts of the brain; all working together in highly significant biofeedback loops! (Think about it this; just how do you decide which flavours or brand of flavour of crisps turn you on the most and, once you have discovered one you most like because usually one stands out for you, do you ignore the rest and primarily go looking for the one your senses prefer?)

Similarly, a carp can decide for itself if it really needs or wants to consume your bait, long before it has actually physically picked it up. The old saying about a carp having to sample a bait by mouthing it because it does not have hands is simply misleading! Carp and other fish will often actually rub their bodies against baits in order to more safely detect what they have to offer and often you will get single bleep line bites from wary carp doing this and using other tricks such as physically picking baits up and moving them on their fins which have various densities of specialised receptor cells on their surface!

Many times fish will roll for long periods over baits simply filter-feeding on dissolved substances and other less soluble substances leaching from baits. This is a very significant area to exploit in pulling fish into your swim, and chilli oils and paprika extracts etc are not the limit of long-range attractors! Read my biography to find out more!

By Tim Richardson.