How much do you know about your bait? In winter and spring the cold temperatures really sort out the best baits from the average. Most usually, those baits that perform best in winter also reliably catch fish all year round, but many baits that catch well in summer may not catch well at all in the cold. But even if you believe that your baits have been optimised for peak performance in low water temperatures you can easily do things to improve their catch rate and boost fish responses!

If you are one of those anglers who stick to their tried and tested methods and tend to struggle in the winter and spring you need to consider why you are fishing using the techniques and methods you use. Very often carp will be sitting or moving around off the bottom in layers of water that are more comfortable. A lot of the time one of the major reasons cold water carp do not get caught is not because they are not willing to take a bait, but because so many anglers use tactic that do not suit the fish.

How many times have you fished a swim where you have seen fish on the surface showing fins for example, but failed to catch while fishing bottom baits or pop-up baits just off the bottom. Much of the time fish in cold temperatures appear to be suckers for baits presented in the upper layers of the water but do not wish to feed in the lower water layers.

Many anglers fish with long hook links with a bait in mid-water for instance. It used to be that most carp were carp by float fishing for them and I am glad I was one of those anglers in the seventies still doing this before getting into the static multiple rod and bite alarm method which just relies on carp self-hooking themselves! This newer form of carp fishing really is less skilful - you can buy all the tackle, baits, rigs, etc and cast out on a commercial water stuffed with over-sized foreign fish and call yourself a good carp angler.

One of the problems for the average carp angler today is excessive expectations. The fact is that if you are an averagely skilled or averagely talented angler you will most usually catch average amounts and sizes of fish. Commercial readymade baits just keep going around in fashionable cycles yet the same old 20 percent of anglers carry on catching 80 percent of the big fish. Average anglers need to remember the way the game is rigged!

The vast majority of high profile faces you see in the magazines with big fish are thinking and doing things that ordinary anglers would normally never do. Think about it; anyone with half a brain can fish almost full-time, tune into a water, pre-bait and establish a going bait using maybe 100 kilograms of boilies or more and hook many-times more big fish than average weekend anglers. Terry Hearn does this kind of thing like many other figures in the tackle and bait industries. Another fact is that most of the big fish in the UK come from those waters which hold the highest density stocking of big fish!

These days the majority of these waters are syndicated and very difficult to get into. So many times in the media you will see the same old faces with the same old fish from the same old syndicates. It is far easier to catch big wary fish from a water that only has 50 to 100 members where swims are nicely widely spaced out where you and your mates are monopolising as few swims and baiting them regularly all year round to hold the majority of the fish (and if you are not in the clique - bad luck!)

This is most often the reality although really talented anglers will catch big fish without spending every week on the bank and without piling 100 to 200 kilograms of bait into a lake over months and months. It might be obvious but carp are energy-efficient creatures of habit and they are pretty lazy.

This means that the bulk of the big fish will monopolise protein-rich food areas over a period of time in the age-old classic baiting pyramid way. Almost any old rubbish bait based on wheat (i.e. semolina) and soya flour can catch most of the big fish out of a lake if anglers pile enough of it -some lakes literally receive a tonne or more of such bait in a year. This has happened for example on Darenth big Lake where such simple bait has actually been dominant in the past despite some anglers still putting in quality fish meal baits for example.

Basically big carp will exploit easy food. Have you ever noticed how most fish seem to come out on whatever bait is put into a lake the most at any point in time. You can see this effect all over the place over the years. Of course some fish respond more to some baits as opposed to others for a wide range of reasons from genetics to specifics of water quality and natural food abundance or scarcity etc through a year.

Much of the reason bait companies keep bringing out new baits is not because their baits have blown - far from it. It is simply that anglers respond strongly to new products on the market and it can really boost sales and even market share to keep announcing new wonder baits in the fishing media.

It is a strange quirk of human nature that we want to exploit lazy-mans short-cuts in the form of any new or different edge that comes our way. These days the majority of good quality food baits simply do not blow; the fish just feed more cautiously on them or adapting how they feed on them to avoid getting hooked.

In the days when fishing over massive beds of boilies was the in-thing, after a while on many waters it was noticed that fishing away from the beds of bait caught the bigger or more wary fish. One trick I use based on such experiences in the Eighties is to fish balanced mini boilies to the side of a bed of big boilies (25 millimetre homemade ones that were highly digestible.) Many buoyant baits like this are fashionably called wafters these days and negate the tell-tale weight of fishing hooks - but you might as well say that Dick Walker caught his record carp from Redmire on a wafter bait (paste-balanced crust!) Just to show how Mr Walker thought about his fishing, after he landed his big common he became focussed on other forms of fishing and I definitely get the impression that part of the attraction of fishing for carp was for him the process of problem-solving and successful fishing solutions by design using measured scientific thinking!

Winter fishing is all about confidence. I see so many anglers jumping on the bandwagon of methods popularised in the magazines. Again you might have noticed how the majority of anglers are followers not innovators. Many times, by the time Mr Average gets on a method or new bait it has already done the business for those in the inside track as it were and used it before it was popularised.

It is a bit like those who claimed they invented the hair rig that revolutionised carp fishing along with boilies and bolt rigs. But I know for a fact that anglers were using many versions of hair rigs with success on the quiet having created these rigs using their own brains. Hair-rigged snails have been used to catch carp in Asia for God-knows how long now, and bass fishermen have hair-rigged live baits when fishing from shore for many decades.

If you want the best from your baits, rigs, fishing methods etc in carp fishing it is a very good edge to always strive to analyse what the fish are doing to adapt and avoid currently fashionable rigs, baits and fishing methods. These days the impacts of fishing pressure caused by anglers certainly causes many fish to behave, feed in highly unexpected and unnatural ways and be in locations that can make all the old classic carp fishing lore about fish location totally wrong. For example, on one water I winter fished most anglers would fish popular swims to the central island margins and deeper water features.

I noticed that there were some areas of bank that nobody seemed to ever fish in the winter and the water there was very shallow with quite exposed banks. Following a hunch and fishing for liners I found that fish crept in the margins there on occasional winter afternoons for a very swift browsing session maybe only lasting 5 to 15 minutes per 24 hours (when the sun had warmed that margin.)

Instead of messing around with copycat spods, stick mixes and Zig-Rigs etc, I used the fish as my prime reference to determine what was going on and how to exploit this new behaviour. Usually doing that takes patience and plenty of experience plus sometimes following gut instinct. All it took was some preparation to exploit this situation.

A plan was immediately hatched using the knowledge of when the fish arrived, how close in they fed and what direction they travelled in from. They were feeding right next to the bank in thick silt that normally would not be fed-in because anglers would have their rods right over the top in that exposed swim.

I had made some very odd-shaped homemade buoyant baits. These baits were used directly on each hook on the top of the shank and I moulded a small amount of specially made resilient paste bait directly onto each hook above and below the buoyant bait so the hooks only just sank.

Each rig was made from 10 pound multi-stranded hook link and was around 2 feet long. I retrieved a heavily water-laden twig from the margins and cut this into short lengths to form safe natural sinking weights. Each rig was tied to short using elastic bands and these I attached a big PVA bag of free bait to each hook.

I had prepared 3 batches of special homemade baits. I had buoyant baits and 2 sets of specially-boosted pastes. The homemade hook bait paste was made so it took a very long time in low temperatures to dissolve, while the other homemade paste was formulated so it literally started dissolving immediately it was immersed. These special paste free baits are a trick I came across by accident while making baits. (Even mistakes are never mistakes in homemade bait-making; most of my baits that did not perform as expected have formed the basis of most of my most effective homemade baits!)

On arriving back at the lake the most popular winter swims were all taken as usual which pleased me. It is sometimes so hilarious to see anglers simply turn up at a water and without any thought of their main reference (i.e. the fish) they set up their bivvies, tackle-up, bait up with their readymade baits and expect miracles - then complain when someone else catches instead!

The rods were no the ground in the mud as the fish could have seem them on sticks and the baits were literally only 3 to 5 feet from the bank in about 4 feet of clear water anyway. Only the main lines protruded from the top of the bank and the rods were kept well back with line in clips, reel clutches set and me in my one-piece thermal suit flat on my bed chair set low.

The free bait pastes were scattered widely around the entire area of the swim and were well broken down to sediment and solution by the time the fish were due to arrive. On cue, the fish arrived and all my free baits had by now melted (including in my PVA bag baits) so there were no whole or crumbed baits to alert the fish. The only whole baits available were the hook baits and the first fish took one of the baits straight way - at 32 pounds it was one of the biggest fish that winter from the lake.

Sometimes it is very entertaining to actually be fishing instead of camping especially when you get action immediately as a result of being far more proactive in your fishing and getting more innovative and thinking about the fish, baits and their potential for getting around angler-conditioned caution successfully in different times of year and in diverse fishing conditions!

As you can appreciate, making unique homemade baits is a controlled and reliable edge in presenting fish with new and unusual baits they can have less reason to be cautious of plus and giving them more reasons than normal to take hook baits with confidence! Revealed in my unique big carp and catfish homemade bait and readymade bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information - see my unique website Baitbigfish and my biography for details now!

By Tim Richardson.

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