Carp Fishing Bait Secrets Of Getting More Big Fish Bites!
Top fishermen know that by exploiting the way your target fish feed at any time of day or night or time of the season, they can reliably improve their catches and keep catching more consistently than the average angler. This is one very significant bait and rig subject which is neglected by the majority of anglers. In fact fish like carp change their mode of feeding all the time even over a 24 hour period or in an instant and you can manipulate and induce changes in feeding to catch far more fish!
If you ever fished a match using tiny hooks for bloodworm or jokers as bait, you will know how powerful these fish catching baits are. One of the best feeding triggers for carp and one of the most abundant amino acids found in mature carp tissues is alanine which also happens to be found in abundance in blood worms and jokers. Fish instinctively feed in the most energy efficient way depending on the food supply available and how and where it is located and how spread out or dense or large or small the food items are.
You may have watched koi or goldfish sucking algae off the sides of a pond. But carp can also feed by filtering tiny items from the water, while moving and even while stationary. The position and concentrations of natural foods like algae and crustaceans called zooplankton or daphnia fluctuate depending on sunlight angle and intensity, temperature and water mineral and oxygen concentrations among other time and seasonal variations. The successful use of very fine ground baits is one way to induce the filter feeding type of modes whilst on the way to the angler inducing feeding on larger food items such as boilies for instance.
You can exploit various feeds and fine liquid additives with particles in suspension to induce this kind of feeding, although there are many endless options for doing this effectively and yeast and liver powders and corn steep liquor and various less refined fish oils are obvious examples to begin with. Fish can taste their food using taste buds located in their pharyngeal cavity so this form of feeding is not sight oriented but taste oriented. Using induced filter and pump filter (gulping type feeding,) fish can get the nutritional stimulation of your free and hook baits without actually touching your baits but then having filter fed on them will often be in a far more excited physiological and mental state when they actually physically feed on them and carp filter feed predominantly in turbid waters.
When filter feeding and using similar and related modes, carp can actually benefit from you baits nutrition and attraction without even touching them which definitely has its advantages if you use this to excite them fully before they actually feed. Such things as vegetable and fish oils, fine crustacean and milk extract powders and liver and digestive tract extracts for example, can all be exploited, but there are thousands of choices. You bait substances through carp filter feeding can induce a feeding frenzy state even before your carp have even swallowed a single bait!
Carp, barbel and tench and even trout and bass feed to varying degrees using filter feeding and they use branchial sieves to do so. These are adjustable in order to catch the most profitable nutritious particles sizes available, depending on concentration and abundance. These are also adjusted to catch batches of particles or individual large ones. In feeding terms, carp are categorised as suction feeders and slow ones at that, but that hides the fact that they can suck up items at a tremendously powerful velocity when required which has great rig implications especially when a fish is filter feeding on food at a long distance from the fish’s head where long rigs and critically balanced baits have great benefits!
Not all attention should be placed upon the chemical sensing of food items as with carp as other sense may also predominate including sight and even electrical lateral line detection of the tiny movements in the water of zooplankton! In the case of bait size, the diameter of the fish’s mouth is not always the limiting factor in certain feeding details, but in fact the diameter of the throat where chewing of food takes place. Small items are more natural to feed on for carp for much of the year round except at times when larger nutritious items are abundant such as fry in spring and molluscs like larger snails in the autumn etc.
Although filter feeding modes in carp reflect their most dominant small sized natural foods you can overcome their preoccupation with these to get them to feed on your fishing baits by also using fine particulate feeds and smaller baits at least to begin with in your ground baits, method mixes, stick mixes etc. Many carp in pressured fisheries regard eating 21 millimetre pellets nad boilies as natural as they literally depend on them for essential dietary requirements, but it does not mean using hook baits of this size make it easier to catch warier fish. The finding is that smaller baits do often fool carp better than large baits and this is not merely due to the fact that proportionately far greater numbers of anglers use baits over 1 centimetre in size…
If you look at the success of captures on small pieces of baits fished over crumbs of baits or fine particulate ground baits saturated with nutritional liquid food additives with added blood worms, maggots, sweetcorn and hemp seeds etc, you can see distinct advantages because it taps into more of the fishes ranges of natural modes of feeding. It is no surprise that fishing tiny hook baits makes sense for big fish even those with huge mouths, when their most efficient and predominant modes of feeding involve the gulping, filter feeding and particulate feeding modes, as opposed to chasing down prey fish for example (although carp do this too.) When you match up the primary feeding modes of your target fish at that time of season to the ground baits, rigs and hook bait characteristics and sizes you choose using a bit more expert knowledge, and your fishing success can be truly multiplied for life…
By Tim Richardson.
