Homemade Carp Fishing Baits - Successful Mixing Rolling and Binding Ingredients and Methods
by Tim RichardsonMaking your own secret catfish or carp baits is exciting and fun! It can result in catches you only ever dreamt of!
But many fishermen resist making their own baits. Unfortunately, they give up before they have even started. This is due to having been given the false impression that it’s to complicated, and that it’s only for expert fishermen, when the reverse is true!
In fact, when you make good homemade baits, you can potentially catch loads more fish than other anglers of your experience level.
Making and mixing dry dough baits and boilies:
(There’s more great information for more experienced anglers later in this article, so please bear this in mind!)
To make things much easier for everyone, let’s start by using a ‘standardized starting measure’. Often it’s easiest to bring a combination of dry flours, meals and ground materials together, to form one dry powder mixture. You can then add this to eggs or water, to make dough bait, paste bait, or so-called ‘boilie’ baits.
Boiled baits are most often small round dough bait balls, with eggs included. When these dough baits are dropped into boiling water for a minute or two, then a tough resistant skin is created around each bait, and this helps them last much longer on the hook, or on the specialist carp ‘hair rig’.
This is a short line loop (attached to your hook) of perhaps half an inch in length. A boilie bait is slid onto this loop, using a special baiting needle. The bait is held in place using a small piece of grooved plastic or rubber to hold it in place. Such baits can effectively last on this rig for over 24 hours in the water, if necessary.
A typical homemade ‘dry ingredients base mixture’, is usually divided into 1 pound weights or 16 ounces. (Approximately 500 grammes.) By doing this you can design your bait by listing it’s ingredients in individual ounces. You can use your fishing scales and a plastic bag to help you do this!
You may prefer to use kilograms, as your ‘reference weight’ if you are making very large amounts of bait. Either way, this makes everything else easy, because you always know how much water, or eggs, or actual ingredients of which type you have put into your mix.
It is very important to make notes of each ingredient and the amounts used in your bait base mixes. Also any liquid attractors like flavours, amounts of eggs used too, as this will save you much head scratching, and unnecessary mistakes later. Making detailed records is the key to successful bait making and makes everything easy!
A simple but effective beginner’s dry ‘base mix’ for example, is the following:
* 6 ounces of ground-up trout or salmon pellets or fish meal powder.
* 5 ounces of Semolina or ground rice flour.
* 5 ounces of ground-up soya beans (or flour.)
Start by placing your dry ingredients into a big strong polythene bag; it may be quicker and easier to mix up perhaps 6 to 10 pounds of powders at a time. (3 to 5 kilograms). Blow some air into the bag and tie up the top securely. Shake the contents very well until the powders flow and have mixed thoroughly and the mixture is an even color.
You can weigh out 1 pound or 1 kilogram batches of powders, and put these into sealed labelled individual bags for storage, for later use. It’s a good idea to weigh out a 1 pound of powders and put this into a container that holds approximately this amount.
This means that from now on every time you make bait you can quickly just fill that can with any new base mix powder and you know you will have about a 1 pound dry mix to start with; to add to your liquid ingredients and eggs, etc.
Mixing your bait:
Put some powders into a large bowl or pan, e.g. one pound of dry mix, crack 4 to 6 hen eggs into another large bowl and add your other liquid ingredients to them. (Some may require accurate measuring using a needle-less syringe.)
Examples of additives to put in at this stage might include sweeteners, liquid molasses, squid extract, sweet garlic oil, liquid amino acid compound, liquid betaine, flavor components, honey, yeast extract, anise extract etc.
Beat these very well until the consistency and color are even.
I tend to over flavour with an alcohol based flavour if I’m making baits to be fished as purely lone ‘attractor baits’ with no free offerings being used.
Add the dry powders, small amounts at a time, until the mixture forms a moldable dough. (It’s sometimes good to leave the mix in a sealed bag somewhere cool for 2 to 3 hours, and even leave the ‘soaking’ paste dough in the fridge overnight. This allows the liquids to penetrate into even the least soluble ingredients and really helps bait performance by maximizing its water soluble liquid attraction!)
By weighing any dry mix in a bowl, you can find the weight of dry mix required for each further 4 to 6 egg mix. Please note that every base mix you design is different and needs refining for the best mixing, rolling, digestibility, attraction, and water solubility ratios and properties you require for your particular fishing circumstances!
Roll the dough (like in bread making) to release air. You have many choices at this stage, like perhaps use a rolling pin to flatten the dough on a bread board, and then cut your dough into many odd shaped pieces. (A very quick bait making method, and a proven one for excellent catches!)
Or perhaps squeeze small pieces into dense blobs, or roll dough into sausages and create cylinder shaped pellets or flat cylinder shapes, or flat discs. (Ideal for weed and silt etc). Or chop dough into pieces and hand roll them into balls of varied sizes. (And even chop these pieces in half for another alternative shape!) A little vegetable oil on your palms will help if your baits are sticky.
I aim to create baits that will really look, act and feel different to the regimented commercial baits that the majority of anglers slavishly use predominantly these days; doing this is well worthwhile; how many carp don’t see perfectly round shaped boilies these days and don’t know how to avoid the hook where these are used most frequently?
Never forget that we anglers are training the carp to danger when we really need to keep re-educating them into thinking what we are offering them is safe! Well at least until they’ve been hooked!)
Prepared paste will ideally feel like a moldable bread dough without being sticky, this is very quick and easy to make boilies with minimum trouble, mess and time!
Try placing sausages into an empty, very clean mastic gun with the end nozzle cut to a diameter of e.g. 15 millimeters, and extrude smaller sausages to put onto a bait rolling table (a dual half round grooved device that chops and rolls simultaneously producing many round baits very fast!
I like to roll out sausages of various diameter and boil these, chopping them up when dry. I also make molded hook baits between thumb and forefinger, some with specially added cork granules to make them buoyant.
Put on a large pan of boiling water when boiling I add sweeteners like molasses, honey, brown sugar, black treacle, and liquorice extract and sea salt etc. This really gives your boiled baits ‘different’ extra attraction despite having the usual firm skin but has more 'attraction' at the surface).
I will often spike my hook baits or cut pieces off them to ensure their surface releases attractors much faster and can also absorb bait soaks more efficient. This really produces noticeably faster too at times. I’ve even caught fish to mid twenty pounds ‘on the drop’ straight after casting the bait in the water.
Put some bait into a sieve or chip fryer, and boil the baits for up to an average time of 90 seconds. (The less the better to retain the nutritional qualities of your bait; you want them coming back for more!) Don’t forget that with using alcohol based flavors for example, these are boiling away into the air as vapors with every second; boiling points need to be considered! (Betaine will not boil off, but is best used to intensify amino acids effects among other things...)
So, why not give bait making a go; you really can have your ‘cake’ and eat it!
This fishing baits secret books author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches.
By Tim Richardson.