These are the best guides to improve your catches:

There are many ways to make very successful fishing baits without using flavours; why not try using very powerful ‘naturals ingredients and extracts!’

Freshwater flies, bloodworm, insect larvae, water snails, and all kinds of sea and freshwater shellfish like mussels etc, can all be incorporated into your fishing baits, giving a natural taste and crunch factor, and are available from many pet and fishing bait companies.

It is important, to make your bait as different as possible from the ‘normal’ for your water, to give you a competitive advantage.

As an example, I used a bait which was purely based on proprietary ‘coldwater goldfish food’ which instead of being the usual pellets form, was based on natural nutritional extracts like spirulina, impregnated into rice flakes.

I was using this bait as a test bait to find a successful alternative protein based bait. It incorporated daphnia (water fleas,) and spirulina (algae,) together; forming a truly ‘unique’ natural, alternative boilie.

I mixed the flakes with a small amount of semolina, as I did not know how much the flakes (based on ground rice,) would bind. After taking what seemed like literally hours to mould each individual bait by thumb and fore fingers, I convinced myself it would all be worth the effort!

I did not wish to ‘contaminate’ the bait with extra semolina binder and reduce its effectiveness. I prepared ‘hair rigs’ in advance of fishing and carefully dried the paste hook baits until they went hard and tough enough to stay on the rig.

At the lake, as it turned out, within half an hour of casting out, I hooked the lake record fish at that time weighing around 35 pounds in weight.

It was a valuable lesson in the attraction of alternative protein based baits, and the benefits of their use! This was on a fishery where extremely good quality milk protein and fish meal baits had dominated catches at that time!

The fact is that natural extracts have far more to them than meets the eye; or the nose! They can be used raw in 'poly vinyl alcohol' bags as near proximity hook bait attractants. They are also excellent in ground baits or chum. They are packed with natural carp feeding triggers and attractors which carp find in their natural environment.

There are many stimulating components of extracts which carp have an essential dietary need for, like certain minerals, vitamins, amino acids, oils etc. If carp get dependant on baits beased on such extracts, their growth rates and health can be improved, especially if a water has low natural food levels perhaps due to low water quality, or has a high stocking of fish.
So get on them now and reap the rewards!

The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches.

By Tim Richardson.