How many times do you read a bait company advertisement telling you their bait is better and stands out from the rest? I wonder just how true this is in practice; verifying such a claim in terms of better catches than on other baits is quite a challenge. Much can be misinterpreted among the myriad of variables you will encounter!

The fact is that any bait which the fish have little reason to fear and having many biophysical and even psychoactive reasons to consume for instance, will be sampled, at least once. After all, you only need one take from a fish to hook it even if it never even attempts to sample that bait ever again! But what in truth can actually make your bait stand out from the rest when fish can quite possibly eat and experience many different baits over the course of a day or a year?

Well this is one are where the much popularised theory of the high nutritional value (HNV) bait can seem a bit over-sold. How can a carp decide to eat one bait in preference to many other baits if they all contain very well balanced stimulating and essential nutrition within the ingredients and additives and so on? Do carp even have an instinctive food preference system at all?

It is clear that if carp or humans did not have such a mechanism we would have died out long ago. In fact humans would not have evolved because we are very long-lost descendants of teleost fish; we share many similarities in our essential amino acid requirements. These are the building blocks of our body's proteins and are essential in most of our bodies processes too including respiration and fish and human metabolism...

Without the absolutely essential amino acids from proteinn in the diet we would simply become unhealthy, diseased, weakened and die. Imagine what would happen to us as ancient humans if all we ate all day was peanuts; which are limited in the amino acid profile they offer and lacking in some of these extremely vital nutrients. When unfavourable conditions come along, like cold temperatures in winter with the biological stresses upon the immune system this causes, do you think our cave man ancestors bodies would have been resilient and healthy enough to cope?

In fish and in humans there very obviously a highly evolved survival system which instinctively tells us by biofeedback and other means which food in the environment will enable us to survive. Discernment may be for example via taste, smell and many other senses (plus ones yet to be fully revealed I'm sure.) It is obvious that organisms lacking this system have not survived; everything must fulfil its essential needs.

Now back to our carp fishing baits and what makes a bait truly stand out. Let's say that based upon all the data that marine scientists and fish nutritionists etc have to offer, we have a range of highly nutritional carp fishing baits which all catch fish on a range of different waters. These waters may differ in size, fishing pressure placed upon them, the strains of carp stocked, pH (alkalinity etc) and richness of natural food and its availability throughout the year etc.

You would expect that fished side by side all these baits would continue to produce fish year in year out equally well. The fact is that they do not, and this is just one of the key reasons why there is such a wide variety of bait recipes, ingredients, flavours formulas and so on (ignoring bait company product strategy etc.) Apart from all the variables concerned with the actual fishing pressures; which fish have been previously caught on which baits, natural food availability and other impacts upon results, there is one effect which appears mostly ignored.

This factor is the impact upon fish biologically in terms of essential nutritional needs satisfied by the baits themselves; which can in fact actually produce an effect which prevents fish eating more bait, even without being hooked on it. It stands to reason that when a carp has satisfied its essential nutritional requirements it no longer needs to eat bait, especially in a situation boosted by natural foods made even more abundant due to fish eating bait instead!

You may think that fish will eat the same bait indefinitely, but where the above effect occurs teamed with the anxiety and behavioural impacts caused by previous hooking on a bait then results can certainly diminish over time. So it means that a bait needs an extra edge other than just biological nutrition value, purely receptor stimulation, metabolism stimulation, pure digestibility and assimilation or conversion into body mass efficiency, or even superior basic energy efficiency. This edge could well mean a psychological or psychoactive edge.

These are the kind of effects that can truly sort out the baits which stand out as continually consistently successful against other proven nutritional baits. This is an area the true bait masters expertly exploit, (even using poorer nutrition carbohydrate based baits,) but which you will hear very little about! I can offer that many substances, ingredients and extracts can be sourced and used to adapt your baits even if readymade ones are what you use...

This fishing bait secrets book author has many more fishing and bait edges; just one could impact very significantly on your catches!

By Tim Richardson.

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Tim Richardson is a homemade carp and catfish bait maker and proven big fish angler. His unique bait making and enhancing fishing secrets guides are catching big fish for readers in 45 countries so get yours NOW!