Do you use bait dips, glugs and soaks with your readymade boilies? If you do add these to any bait then they are not optimised to become super concentrated solution which is the primary format that carp most strongly respond to! If you need to add liquid to your bait then your bait is not genuinely optimised for performance and is in fact pitifully under optimised! Heated baits which are bound and sealed with egg are a great method to actively reduce your potential catches! Read on to discover the truth and catch more fish!
Use of liquid egg in readymade baits is the most common potential danger signal available to carp to be wary of! Also egg inhibits bait digestion in multiple ways. Liquid egg and egg powder and egg albumin also make baits massively less optimised for success as they literally make them insoluble thus defeating the most powerful characteristic of any bait!
On waters where boilies are used first time, the fish often do not realise they are food because they give off such pitiful concentrations of stimulatory solution due to being heated and sealed by egg! On waters new to boilies, my friends and I have well confirmed that the massively superior method to achieve instant results is to use paste and other unheated baits and not to use heated sealed baits. This just shows how bad heated baits are as a bait format! Time and again I have found the most instant way to establish new recipes of baits to a water is by using unheated baits; and not by using heated boilies!
The success of this has been so striking to me that when added to every other factor and reason I have discovered in what makes baits truly optimised for success I no longer consider successful bait as a solid at all. I now think of bait purely as a liquid not solid paradigm! When I think of bait I do not think of a solid ball or barrel or anything like these concepts because these are irrelevant. What matters is what reacts with the water, the potency of solution in active reaction. This is what matters; fish swim in solution and are surrounded by solution at all times.
They detect everything in their environment via solution. Water supporting fish is a complex solution of dissolved minerals, micro organisms, suspended algae and zooplankton, suspended decaying vegetative and animal debris, silt in solution and soil and chemical running off the land, acid rain etc; you name it!
Water fish exist in is solution of many things and is never just pure water, yet so many bait tests are carried out in tanks with pure water tainted perhaps with the toxins chlorine and fluorine, and heavy metals and other tap water contaminants. Fish are evolved to detect opportunities and threats in solution and through solution. When fish get feeding hard they are very often either surrounded by clouds of silt or suspended particulate matter stirred up by the movements of fish. How many times do anglers realise that their colourful little hook bait is often covered by silt etc as fish root around the area and stir up bottom silt?
The tone and colour of baits is most often totally irrelevant to success. By contrast it is exactly how a bait actively becomes a concentrated feed triggering solution which is of staggering importance! Solution is what matters most and this is just one reason why concentrated flavours work, because one thing they do is enable many bait substances to become solution easier! (Anyone who says flavours do not work has not figured this out yet!)
On far too many occasions I have observed a fish swim right past a bright colourful readymade bait which has been heated (sealed) in some way, without it even inspecting it. But such fish have responded incredibly well to alternative extra soluble homemade baits which are dark and drab in colour and tone and are notably unheated and made very specifically to produce an especially potent intensely stimulating soluble solution!
For me sight feeding is a very definitely far down the scale of importance when compared to stimulating carp feeding via olfaction, chemoreception and other hormonal and biochemical electrical methods of stimulating fish by leveraging optimally concentrated solution!
One massive advantage making homemade carp fishing baits has over the vast number of readymade baits is they can be optimised for potency and maximised for their capacity to turn into super concentrated feed-triggering solution. Wherever an advert states that such and such a boilie is optimised for performance never believe it. I a bait is heated it cannot easily become solution therefore it is not optimised to become the most highly potent and concentrated solution to trigger fish. For a bait to be truly optimised for performance it has to easily become solution and by this I mean the materials of the bait become solution and do not just leak off a bit of smell or taste, but constant clouds of concentrated solution.
It is easily possible for a person to make totally uncooked hard highly soluble feed-triggering baits which are optimised to become the most potent concentrated solution. Such baits easily out-fish all heated baits. The number of my ebooks readers around the world consistently beating leading readymade boilies by making such baits is proof enough. If I know I am fishing against people fishing whole readymade boilies then the last thing I would consider using is heated readymade boilie baits. I will make unique optimised for potent solution baits and avoid heating them in any way.
Think about it. It is far easier for bait companies to catch your eye with colourful balls and claims of all kinds of features such as the kinds of nutritional ingredients and additives used in their bait. Yet if these baits are heated they are not optimised to become exactly what they need to be in order to work to maximum efficiency as concentrated solution! Simply soaking baits in liquids is not an adequate answer to what is basically a reduced potency bait format. Adding a coating of paste around a boilie is such a joke too as you might as well be using paste all along.
Having to add paste as a covering to heated bait simply proves how much heated baits are not in truth optimised for performance!
All those readymade baits sold with liquid dips to improve their impacts merely demonstrate that heated baits are a drastically under optimised bait format that actually reduce your catches. When you have been using totally unheated baits tested against heated boilies for long enough as I have, then the truth is so crystal clear you will have no wish whatsoever to fish boilies ever again. I view using readymade boilies as a massive waste of time compared to using uniquely potent unheated baits. But when I refer to potency I do mean in regards to unusually high levels of biological activity and other aspects of substances working internally inside fish once consumed or even better still, when solution from them initially makes contact with fish receptors and instantly triggers feeding responses.
When you have had the practice and refinements to make unheated homemade baits that last any chosen timeframe, be it 3 or 6 hours or over 20 hours, you always have the advantage over steamed or boiled baits. I have used unheated hard potently soluble homemade baits on waters packed with crayfish, and had instant results far and away exceeding the catches achieved using boiled and steamed readymade baits.
I do not even like the word boilie now because of the degree that I have found this word by definition to mean an under optimised, time wasting, and catch reducing bait format!
If you are thinking that bait is only about nutrition and consider that nutrition is the big key to bait success think again. What matters ultimately about bait is this; it must achieve as many bites as possible as fast as possible! The point is that bait is not about feeding fish! If you want to feed fish then go and run a fish farm, put maximum weight on them then sell them for food! Personally I never make baits to put weight on fish; any nutritional content is there purely to provide nutrient based soluble stimuli.
If your goal is to put weight on fish you are in the wrong game because fishing is about catching fish not making fish as heavy as possible! Greedy fishery owners and ignorant egomaniac anglers blinded by weight as their only measure of ego success will obviously disagree but so what! The weight of fish caught as a measure of perceived success is an illusion and any truly experienced carp angler will accept that. I have hooked carp to 84 pounds but my most savoured fish was just over 37 pounds and was a UK fish that had been observed but never caught previously.
The fact is that the heaviest fish are not necessarily the hardest to catch, and often many lighter fish are caught far less frequently! If you have had the experience of catching a fish that no other angler has ever caught before, (on a highly pressured water,) then you will understand the truth of this!
On many levels, the more bait you give your fish to eat, the less chances you provide yourself of hooking a fish before some become satiated and stop feeding. Think about it; you want your fish to be as stimulated and hungry as possible to overcome their natural cautions! Factors such as digestibility are not as important as the fact that bait must be easily soluble, and produce a constant stream of dissolved highly potent substances which powerfully excite fish even from a great distance from your swim!
Bait needs to be fish friendly sure, but unless you own those fish why should you pay for the feeding of fish when you are only paying to catch them? It is your responsibility to ensure the safety and care of fish but fishery owners should be aware if fish need feeding they should be doing it with optimum quality feeds that they supply to the lake as feed (and certainly not necessarily as bait!)
Heated boilies are certainly not the optimum fish feeds; any aquaculture feed designer will tell you that! Many greedy fishery owners will want to insist differently of course. However there is a massive difference between baits that convert into body tissues and put weight on fish, and truly energy efficient aquaculture food that translates into healthy fish with optimised immune systems and inner balancing of all vital processes and systems and maximum natural vital energy for maximum longevity of fish!
Heated baits have damaged proteins for a start, but many other factors come into play such as the digestive inhibitive action of egg and the energy expenditure fish pay in digesting heated baits which are not easily water soluble.
Readymade boilies are made to make profits and by definition are very much a significant compromise of many factors that mean they are under optimised. Readymade baits have to be made to turn on anglers as much as fish and this is a massive drawback! Some of the best baits to ever hit the shelves failed as a commercial bait precisely because they dissolved into solution within an hours or less but carp anglers are generally lazy so dislike using such ideal baits. So many carp anglers prefer baits you just stick on a rig and then forget about all night long, knowing they will still be on the rigs in the morning; yet such baits are the least optimised for performance possible!
The truth of this is simple; the longer a bait is intact the less it becomes solution and the less it is actually performing as concentrated solution which is the form carp best respond to! Therefore if your bait lasts only an hour it is performing to maximum potential in terms of becoming concentrated solution. If a bait takes 12 or 24 hours to become solution, the level of concentrated solution of dissolved bait substances such bait produces are pitiful and certainly such baits are far from optimally performing as a stimulatory soluble force in the water!
As a comparison heated baits that last 12 or 24 or 48 or more hours intact in water act like a smoker standing waiting in a line of people giving out a little trail of smoke that maybe the guy standing at the end of the line might notice, only if the wind direction happens to blow the smoke his direction, but he may not even notice the smoke if the wind or air current is not flowing in his direction. Bait solutions really are at the mercy of water currents and flows to a great degree and this is why you need to maximise concentrated solution and unheated baits.
By comparison to heated readymade boilies, imagine using actively water soluble optimised for concentration unheated baits instead. These act in water like the coals in a sauna where any time they contact water they react pumping out gigantic plumes of steam or in this case concentrated stimulatory solution if they were optimised unheated baits. Compare this to the pitiful trail that the vast majority of heated readymade baits give off! Even the oily pellets containing soluble fish proteins etc which are heated and extruded are not necessarily going to perform in water to optimum levels. This is particularly when water temperatures are lower than maybe 15 degrees Celsius!
Just a quick tip here; I have found in reality that cracking conventional hard pellets under pressure before use makes them many times more effective because this opens them up so they are far more able to become solution! This point is absolutely crucial in winter. In fact hard pellets are just as under optimised as whole boilies in many ways. The best way to use hard pellets is when they are at their most biologically active, and at their most water soluble. (But I am not about to give out how to achieve all this here for free!)
Anyone who appreciates the truth about the operation of bait in solution knows that the best baits become fully solution in under an hour. When baits are fully in solution as fast as possible the maximum concentration of stimulatory substances surround fish and produce the most potent concentration gradient for fish to follow. This way maximum numbers of bites can be achieved as fish are so primed and excited yet very little bait is available as whole bait to be consumed.
Any champion match man will tell you the way to keep fish most intensely consistently excited is to keep feeding very soluble bait so that maximum dissolved bait substances are present at all times in the water layers; this is why the fine water soluble ground baits and amino acid rich joker and blood worm upon which fish best particulate and filter feed upon are most successful. Maggots are limited by the fact that fish home on the ammonia they release when first introduced into water and their movements create vibrations fish easily detect, but once movements and ammonia release have reduced maggots are very much an under optimised bait and personally I much prefer unheated soluble baits with features and characteristics suited to acting like malleable, liquid rich and neutral density natural food items!
Optimised bait is really not about food and feeding fish, but keeping the most incredibly potent levels of concentrated solution at a maximum in the water most consistently to keep fish coming back for more, while not providing many kilograms of food which may satiate fish before they get hooked.
Personally I find it much more sane to fish using a low volume of optimised homemade baits than sit for hours using a bed of readymade baits waiting for them to become solution. Years ago many of us older anglers would use a pint of bait for a weekend and yet catch as many fish as anglers using 10 or 20 kilograms of boilies today. When your bait is optimised you really can expect to get bites within minutes of casting out. The very first time I used a totally new unique potency optimised for concentrated solubility unheated bait, I had literally just let go of the rod casting and placing it in the rest before it produced a run.
Going back years I noticed that the most instant over flavoured readymade and homemade baits of this kind would only work for optimum times of up to about 3 hours maximum. Then the liquids have mostly leached out. It was only when I began specifically designing and making homemade baits producing optimised potent concentrated solution over time that my results kept on being significantly consistently successful when compared to results obtained using instant over flavoured readymade baits.
Just on a side note, fish are picking up hook baits all the time and not getting hooked because they have refined the art of not pulling hooks deep into tissue within their mouths. Observe wary fish enough times and you will be shocked at how easily they drop chemically sharpened hooked by various means. By no mean do they actually move away with enough force for a hook to penetrate enough to hook fish without fish being able to twist, up end or shake a hook out in a flash.
Apart from the bait the most important part of your entire fishing is the first 4 millimeters of your hook point. If you make this thin enough to penetrate flesh with as minimal pressure as possible you will always catch more fish. I spend far more time sharpening chemically sharpened hooks manually using diamond hook sharpeners than I do on any other part of my fishing. In fact this includes actually making homemade baits but then I stopped using bait guns and rolling tables years ago as using these is a complete waste of time and far quicker methods are available if you think about it! I actively avoid using rounded or barrel or cylinder shaped baits anyway; carp know all about dealing with these!
Any bait pictures I have with round baits are to demonstrate many things but I always prefer irregular shaped baits by far and never waste time trimming baits because I have no need. Name me one natural food item that is perfectly round with a smooth surface, or is barrel or cylinder shaped!
The best manifestation of bait in solution is when you achieve multiple attempts by fish to take your hook baits. This scenario provides the maximum multiple chances of hooking fish no matter how rig shy or experienced fish may be. To achieve this scenario heated baits pale into insignificance compared to the most refined and most potently optimised unheated baits.
It is like the actual additives, extracts and ingredients etc that you use in your baits. Hemp oil sold and used in fishing gives you a predominantly oily experience. By contrast the most stimulating, most biologically potent hemp oil will actually crackle on your tongue. But this is not a form sold for fishing bait use; it is highly expensive and I had to make extra efforts to specially source this and many other substances that bait companies do not sell. When substances such as this especially powerful hemp oil are so incredibly potent, it only requires a small amount to make fish feed where other hemp oils fail! Potency of each and every part of your bait is so incredibly important!
You can design homemade baits exactly tailored to be optimised to deliver the most highly concentrated biologically active potency solution possible. This is exactly where my focus on making my homemade baits to beat all readymade heated baits is and it really needs to be your focus too if you want to stop wasting many hours every time you go fishing.
Remember, if you need to dip or soak a bait to make it work better then your bait is by definition under optimised and under maximised for success so get into making your own truly optimised for performance homemade baits instead and find out more about how to out fish any heated readymade boilie available! Revealed in my unique readymade bait and homemade bait carp and catfish bait secrets ebooks is far more powerful information look up my unique website (Baitbigfish) and see my biography below for details of my ebooks deals right now!
By Tim Richardson.
