It's exciting and fun to make your own bait. So why not and go fishing and catch fish on your very own bait! It adds a special great feeling of satisfaction to your catches! If you've never made your own bait before, it can be like a door of new possibilities and potential being opened wide for you. You'll discover there's no going back!

A dough, paste or boilie bait will catch many different species of fish and very big ones at that. They are very easy to make too, although more advanced baits designed to seriously select the biggest fish are very often able to catch you far more fish overall than just a ‘basic' bait.

A bewildering variety of different ingredients, additives and flavours can make your baits more attractive to individual species more than others. Let's look at the basics of making a bait that will catch you catfish or carp but many other species too!

Most dough, paste and boilie baits are made with eggs as a major binder substance to bind together usually dry flours, meals and powders to form the bait dough. ‘Boilies' are simply dough baits boiled in water for a short period of time enough to make a protective surface on the bait to make it last longer and be thrown out at range to ‘free bait' swims at range.

They do not necessarily deter small fish, but normally ensure you have your hook bait intact when you reel in your rig after it being in the water for a number of hours.

The main question I get is about how to make a bait bind and roll well. This is because your bait needs to last long enough in the water to survive attentions of ‘pest smaller fish' while waiting for bigger ones to eat your bait.

‘Rolling' is about the making of usually round shapes for dough baits to be boiled, but boiling is not always a necessary procedure by any means. In fact I recommend not boiling baits to wherever possible as this actually locks in perhaps 70% or more of the initial bait attraction which by definition really needs to be water soluble for fish to readily detect and respond quickly to.

It is funny to notice that having boiled baits and even destroyed much of the initial attraction nutrition and soluble effect of the bait, that many anglers now have to soak them in extra soluble liquids, additives and flavours etc, just to make them do what they would do far better when not boiled!

Making a basic bait:

To begin with the first principle to make a dough is always add dry ingredients (as a combined single powder, gradually mixing them into the combined mixed wet ingredients including eggs.

Always write down the amounts of ingredients in your first batch mixed to make things very easy and quicker to repeat successfully.

For example, crack 4 large hen eggs into a bowl. Whisk them up with your chosen flavour and sweetener, perhaps 5 milliliters of strawberry flavour, with a tablespoon full of honey. By adding the dry powder, a large spoon full at a time to the liquid mixture gradually, you can see exactly how much dry powder mixes with your liquid so you can make this stage very quick subsequently.

The level of dry powder mix to liquid mix can change between different ingredients used in different mixes because their absorbency or solubility will be different, so it may take more or less liquid to mix into a bread like dough for bait making.

So you see how keeping note of exactly what you use really helps, especially when your bait really catches lots of fish and you want to make another batch! (This even goes as far as which shop or supplier all your ingredients come from; it pays to be consistent with these details.)

The easiest way to make a dough bait or boilie mix is to purchase a proprietary one in pound or kilogram weight from a commercial fishing bait supplier. You know that the bait will bind together, roll into baits for boilie making and hopefully catch you some fish.

The big drawback of using proprietary baits is often you don not know precisely what ingredients are in the bait in what amounts and ratios. This might seem unimportant, but if you are targeting big fish, this is crucial. The best rule of thumb for good baits of any description perhaps, is to pack them with high levels of liquid protein amino acid supplements.

These can be purchased from chemists or drug stores and are used for body building in drinks. Fish have essential requirements for certain amino acids and many of their most essential are supplied in abundance in these supplements. There are many proprietary forms starting with ‘Minamino' and bait suppliers have various different versions at many concentrations often with added oils, flavours etc.

This supplement is most effective when soaked into your bait after boiling. In the case of dough, I would add as much as possible, for example making your dough with a 50 - 50 percent mixture of eggs and ‘Minamino.'

Some of the simplest dough mixes are of ordinary white flour with an equal amount of ground up sausage meat, or trout pellets, or ground up dry dog biscuits or canned cat food or fish for example. These combinations can be used individually or added together to make them more complex baits.

To each of these combinations just add eggs and your sweetener at perhaps 5 milliliters per 4 large eggs and perhaps your flavour and away you go. If your bait is too wet, just add more dry flour. Added semolina, maize meal or ground rice is commonly used as an added binder material. If your mix is too dry, just add more eggs with sweetener and flavour if desired.

One thing about pet foods is they are very cost effective, are designed to make animals very much want to eat them and are often very highly nutritious and complex balances of essential nutrients and food groups of essential dietary ingredients, often with added enzyme or bacteria to make them more attractive and digestible. Ground up bird foods make excellent baits on their own with added eggs and sweetener. Often the cost of a flavour is not necessary at all for good results.

The key with baits very often is the ability to ground bait your swim regularly sometimes even with very large quantities of bait, either in advance or while fishing. This helps your fish recognise your bait as food and really gets the smells and attraction into the water to pull in the fish. This has a massive impact upon your results, especially for catching the bigger fish.

If the bigger fish are your thing, them far more involved bait components and more complex design considerations can really guarantee results more than basic baits like these.

The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges' up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches. (Warning: This article is protected by copyright.)

By Tim Richardson. ‘The thinking angler's fishing author and expert bait making guru.'

For the unique and acclaimed new massive expert bait making ‘bible' ebook / book:

"BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" SEE:

http://www.baitbigfish.com