The last time I bought baits to go big catfish and carp fishing they cost me around 10 to 12 pounds a kilogram and the cost of cheaper pellets very soon adds up too! For an average weekend, the cost of bait can be just horrendous, putting a big strain on very many already tight household budgets. It really does make much more sense to make your own baits and save yourself a fortune! They are far easier and quicker to make these days with excellent information and equipment available. And I am finding among fellow anglers, a not too surprising rapidly growing interest in developing homemade bait making skills, which many of us honed some 30 or more years ago.

Every time I have used a homemade bait that is different to the popular baits on a water, big fish have appeared and this is one of those definite points about carp which you can exploit using homemade baits. Fish learn by association and will find your new baits much harder to resist than popular readymades that already have been exploited. This difference is often the factor that decides if you get a run of big fish, or just average results, or series of memorable personal best fish sessions or lots of blanks!

Now I'm not saying that you will produce a wonder bait which fish simply jump straight into your net and beg for! Even with the very best baits, all the usual skills of fish location, bait application and skilfully playing your big fish are still required. But on your own homemade baits, the rewards and joys of catching your personal life time best fish on your personal secret bait formula is just incredible. This is why it is so important to exploit the massive fish catching factor of making your baits very unique.

Bait only really has a peak of effectiveness when fish feed confidently on it because they know they most likely will not get hooked and risk getting taken home for tea. Sure we put them back, but if you were hooked and dragged out of your safe air environment into a foreign one you would be wary of any bait that has led to you being hooked previously too! Making your own alternative secret bait recipes is such a great advantage over the masses who use readymades without a further thought to their never talked about disadvantages!

Popular baits in many ways do have a shelf life in terms of longevity of effectiveness. Top bait manufacturers will tell you that even in a stock pond which has never been fished, when a new bait has been fished intensively by a number of anglers successfully, their results can slow right up even literally to the point of no more fish being caught on that bait. (This is no exaggeration, for example Gary Bayes of the international bait company Nash Baits told me of his experience of this!) Many baits exploit highly concentrated flavors in order to affect bait pH to stimulate fish. Others use the biological nutritional value approach and call their baits food baits for this reason.

I could not believe how easy and simple it was for me to make baits that hooked big fish straight away literally while still hot, even using the most basic of ingredients. Homemade baits can be just amazingly instant and fill you will so much confidence. I do not even bother to make baits that have a round or barrel shape or an even skin at all and I most often do not even boil them to make them resilient boilies either. This is because your greatest edge with bait is their difference. Therefore if you bait feels different, has a different shape, colour, texture, buoyancy, density, firmness or softness or permeability or solubility for example, then it is far more likely to out-fish readymades with ease! That is why making homemade baits is so easy.

Many fisherman overlook the advantages of not making their baits oval in shape. Remember carp remember; so using angular baits or non oval baits is a definite advantage. Just with a handful of eggs and a pound of semolina and soya flour you can make limitless different baits utilising any of thousands of additives and flavors, sweeteners and appetite stimulators and so on, or just one! Such a bait will form a protective skin if you drops pieces of such baits in water or scald them with steam. Why bother boiling your baits when bait which is merely dried in warm air are frequently more effective than boilies?

Your imagination is free to exploit so many options that trigger fish feeding, but relatively few form the elite group of the very best; and you need to seriously do your homework to discover exactly what these are, how they impact on fish senses and fish internal processes etc, and how best exploit them to maximum effect in baits and ground baits.

I know a reasonable diversity of these in great practical depth having exploited them to great effect in many bait recipes, formats and different waters. But then I have spent the last 30 plus years researching this very vital fishing area. (These have been very hard-earned; and are exceptionally powerful secrets when suitably applied in practice!) Big success can hinge upon using just one bait substance, or your whole fishing formula and your own unique fishing approach!)

The easy way to make a paste or boilie bait base mix is to use about 6 hen eggs in a pot or bowl, whisked with about 5 millilitres of cheap new generation cake flavours and 1 to 2 millilitres of any of an assortments of intense sweeteners. Then slowly add a fifty - fifty mixture of semolina powders and soya flour or maize meal or corn flour, until you have a workable dough, not too sticky and soft and not too firm to pull apart easily.

You can use your dough as paste bait immediately or if you are making bait for later use, then form some into individual baits and air dry them or steam or boil them, dry them overnight on suitable paper or towels and bag and store them in polythene bags. Freezing bait when fully prepared seals in bait freshness which is very important. It is vital to preserve the intact presence of highly stimulatory nutrients that have bioactive impacts upon fish senses for instance and to prevent undesirable off-flavours from tainting your baits. (You may have noticed the huge difference in catch results, between using the freshest shop-bought baits, compared to baits of unknown age and freshness sold simply to get them off the shelves to make room for new stock...)

If you remember to write which ingredients and levels each bait was made with, then you will never forget how to make them again! Normally it takes 6 large hen eggs to produce about 2 pounds of finished bait dough to use, or produce paste or air-dried baits, steamed or boiled baits etc. Some baits will break down faster or slower than other mixtures depending on the number of eggs you use; the more soluble the ingredients and the more of these used, the faster your bait will dissolve in water.

I understand value like anyone else so making homemade bait for 1 to 3 pounds as opposed to buying it readymade for 6 to 12 pounds makes great economic sense; particularly when your homemade bait catches can frequently be outstanding fished against readymade baits! This is even more startling especially when you think of the saving on 10 or 20 kilograms of homemade baits compared to the cumulative cost of commercially produced readymade bait.

Homemade baits can be experienced very differently when compared to the most popularly used readymade baits, so then when a fish encounters it is very much more likely to take it into its mouth. After all, carp experience conventional commercial baits 24 hours a day all year round on my busy fisheries; usually with hooks in them!

This is a big reason why so many homemade baits catch so many big fish compared to very many readymade baits as the biggest fish have least reason to reject them out of conditioned fear through being hooked previously. Homemade bait makers might appear to get lots of beginners luck with big fish and this is no coincidence; unusually consistent big fish catches are very easily possible with a little more knowledge of bait making!

By Tim Richardson.

For the unique bait making and bait secrets bibles: "BIG CARP & CATFISH BAIT SECRETS!" And: "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP FLAVOURS, FEEDING TRIGGERS, FISH CHEMORECEPTION AND OLFACTION SECRETS!" now visit: http://www.baitbigfish.com Tim Richardson is a homemade carp and catfish bait maker and proven big fish angler - these unique bait and fishing secrets guides have powerfully proven themselves for big fish catches in over 45 countries!