By beginning to making homemade baits by starting out by considering what carp are most sensitive to, this is far more likely to succeed than arbitrarily forming a list of ingredients you like the sound of or smell of personally! So many anglers just know the very basics about a carp and it is not surprising that relatively few anglers actually know why a bait or ingredient stimulates carp to take a bait into its mouth - and why some baits and ingredients are multiples of times more effective!
When speaking to many fellow anglers it is clear that the vast majority are dependant on expensive readymade boilies and pellets. When you are dependant upon readymade baits instead of producing your own, your bait budget is to a very large extent decided by the pricing of readymade baits. When anglers are dependant on readymade baits they are completely at the mercy of others to decide their bait modes of action and competitiveness over other baits, and cost; which is not necessarily an ideal situation to be in!
Why allow someone else to decide your fishing budget when you can do it yourself and save an absolute fortune?! Whether your readymade baits cost you 5 pounds or 12 pounds a kilogram you can undercut and vastly reduce this cost and still out-fish all those popular readymade baits - when you know how! Once again you need to know some of the most vitally important details of fish senses, and how to best exploit them to get most bites by leveraging various (endlessly varied) combinations of ingredients, special compounds, liquid foods, flavour components, oils etc.
Bait-making beginners can take many short-cuts by learning and avoiding the kinds of commonest mistakes that other bait-making anglers have made and then avoided themselves over the years through their own experience! Over the last 34 years of carp fishing I have had well over 80 percent of my own homemade baits work on many waters even from the first cast. Sure some waters demand bait changes and adjustments to be successful and these days this often is in regards to out-competing other baits as opposed to simply attracting fish!
Bait-making beginners usually make the most common mistake of falling into the trap of thinking like an angler and relying on personal judgements and opinions about bait substances and flavours to formulate baits instead of starting off with the fish themselves (which is obviously where the true power is!) Avoid limiting your bait success by getting to know your fish very well indeed inside and out! By focussing on the fish in the first instance and not on bait substances you will be thinking like a carp and be able to get the edge over the majority who merely think like anglers.
How to make homemade carp baits
Many very effective bait substances appear not to initiate a response from carp when applied to water on their own, but applied in combination with other substances very definitely have powerful effects in either many obvious or just as often much more hidden more subtle internal ways that work over a period of time after baits have been eaten! Many bait substances are not even used to trigger feeding or to attract fish directly but can make baits more noticeable to fish or more palatable or make them much more habit-forming! I laugh when anglers refer to their favourite flavours in terms of describing their baits because it is often baits that smell of nothing discernible to us humans that can be the most productive for big wary fish!
Carp are constantly evolving individuals able to sense new substances to various degrees even if foreign to their aquatic environment and so are able to monopolise new potential food sources - something we can exploit to maximum effect to catch more fish! Carp an be conditioned to respond to our baits in similar ways to dogs being trained to behave in ways their owner wants by rewarding them with snacks and designing unique new baits to provide both instant and long-term rewards certainly can condition their behaviours in our unique favour when regularly applied as well as affecting their future taste and smell preferences etc! You can choose specific ingredients, additives and liquids etc to manipulate carp modes of feeding or condition senses or certain modes of behaviours or exploit or adapt preferences leading to many more bites on your baits compared to other baits, so it really pays to choose wisely and find out more! (For far more information see my website Baitbigfish and my unique carp bait secrets ebooks now!)
By Tim Richardson.