Possibly the most overlooked secret to winning the fishing game comes from saving money on bait; but how, do you ask?! Many anglers miss-out on fantastic catches even though the baits they use are popular big fish catchers seen in the press and so on! But you can save yourself a fortune in wasted bait and improve your catches drastically!
Most often carp and catfish anglers use boilies, pellets and hemp, maize and sweetcorn and prepared commercial ground baits, as free baits to attract and hold fish in their swim. And these are obviously consistent baits for fish like carp and catfish. But often the hidden (or obvious) problem, is that you end up with many fish gorging upon your free ground baits and not getting hooked at all, or comparatively little, compared to the feeding activity going on in your swim. This happens far more than anyone is really accurately aware of and is a more truly shocking thing when you calculate just how much of your bait is consistently going to waste...
If you are consistently feeding your swim each time you fish and this does not consistently equate to better catches, then you are simply feeding the fish, going through the motions and expecting miracles to occur as doing the same thing repeatedly and keeping expecting results to be different is simply a definition of insanity!
This point does not just apply to angling-pressured carp, but catfish too, of that there is absolutely no doubt. So the point is, how to stop wasting money on feeding your fish with free baits when this does not consistently convert into increasingly better catches! The cost of simply spending time fishing often involves loss of earnings in time, or at the very least the increasing travelling costs, food and drink costs, fishing permit costs and all those renewed tackle item costs and so on!
So converting your bait money at the very least into better catches, is perhaps even more of an issue, especially in tough times. Of course every fishery is different and these days there are many waters that are over-stocked to the degree that it appears everyone catches fish successfully. But who is to know just how much better your individual catches can really be until you truly get innovative and prove it to yourself?
It is the common habit of the average angler to put out free baits upon arrival at a fishery without too much thought about his or previous anglers impacts at any one moment in time, where fish may not actually feed confidently on baits that are fresh as they are associated with danger. The first few days and nights on many waters can just be largely a waste of time if fished conventionally. On harder waters it is most often the case that fish will shy away from fresh baits, preferring to feed on them when water has penetrated and leached them for a number of days and nights.
On very pressured fisheries, Mr average angler will bait-up upon arriving and perhaps fish for 48 hours, maybe blank, and then be followed into the swim by another angler who simply does the same things with the same thinking approaches, and gets the same poor catches as a result! This is a pattern that is prevalent on so many carp waters today and the conveyor-belt like manifestation of the straight-jacketed thinking the majority of average anglers seem satisfied with. Yes, occasionally the fortunate angler who happens to be in a previously such pre-baited swim with get good results and hence the appearance of so many so-called popular swims! But all this incessant baiting on many water in certain swims can backfire as fish respond to captures, and in such a case all the bait can go off and kill the swim (as Mr average carp angler arrives and baits up again , adding to the problem!)
When your fishing activities become habitual and a kind of automatic process, this often means you have by-passed your thinking processes and are not focussing upon the constantly changing challenges that changing variables and fish behaviours and impacts of other anglers seriously have, and your results will severely reflect this! After all, you might well act differently every day in order to fool predators just to see the next day and carp have this instinct to survive which they use all the time which means what we do or think that worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work today...
For instance, it was very lucky of me to catch a carp of 38 pounds; an amazing very pale white mirror (not koi carp) from one very pressured UK water. In over 7 years it was seen but not caught, but it was the combination of new bait, rig, baiting method and frequency and other things combined that produced this fish, (that all those anglers did not do previously,) and this unique combination produced dozens more good fish following this capture.
It took new bait attractors and rarely used feeding triggers in (new concentrations and combinations,) plus new baiting approaches, methods and applications to catch that very special fish which was followed by numbers of other good fish proving the effort of though even more worth-while. But there is something on every water to exploit that defeats the natural and angler-trained conditioning of fish responses and reactions to what you do in order to catch them. Being different even in one single way or combining new, adapted or new combinations of old ways etc can all achieve what just going through the motions cannot!
By fully considering the implications of your fishing activities on fish, in terms of negative and positive impacts on their senses, in relation to the progressive conditioning by angling activities and baits and natural senses and behavioural sensitivities, you can unlock excellent results. The questions and answers may be common to all waters, but there will always be things unique in your fishing of any particular water that produces better results; being refined specifically for that exact moment in time on that water. By leveraging your more exacting angling solutions at any moment in time on a water, you can know for sure that your bait costs will be leveraged to far greater effect and this avoids so much of that bait wastage that simply going through the motions produces!
To leverage the true power of your baits does take a little extra effort on your part but that effort is never wasted! But I hope this article makes you think a little more of further possibilities the next time you bait-up, as usual... This bait secrets ebooks author has many more fishing secrets insights and bait edges available and just one could impact very significantly on your big fish catches!
By Tim Richardson.