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Some days when you’re fishing for bigger fish of the carp or catfish kind, it seems like everything you try just won’t produce a ‘bite.’ But then something happens that changes everything. What is that special something? Let’s see... You know those days when those fish are seen cruising and sunning themselves and look easy enough to catch in a big net if you got close enough! But to get them to eat a bait seems utterly futile? Generally these hard times can be attributed to the prevailing temperatures and air pressures, or angling pressure, or fish may pre-occupied with spawning rituals and preparation etc. These times can seem pointless when all your tried and trusted rigs and bait changes don’t produce anything near a positive feeding response. But the secret may well be that it’s just your timing is out by a few hours or even a few days. A few hours or days later and you could be having the catch of a lifetime. Fish feeding and the secrets of their natural rhythms which are intricately linked to prevailing conditions affecting the aquatic environment are key to successful fishing trips. When you have the long experience of ‘reading’ the water and have an inner mental picture of where the fish are and what they are possibly doing in present weather conditions you are normally a few steps ahead of the beginner already. Take into recent weather patterns, current angling activity, the affects of anglers’ free baiting on possible predictable fish movements and get armed with details of recent captures. Now you can really predict at least where feeding fish might be if not today, then perhaps tonight, or in the morning or in a few days time. Fishing can sometimes be like a game of chess. Success can often be about taking actions to affect fish movements instead of relying on their complicity by handily eating your bait immediately you begin fishing. This is often not necessarily the case. Therefore you might want to put the odds a bit more in your favour. Many anglers think that all bait is equal. But in the case of big carp and catfish fishing, this is not so. I once fished virtually full-time on a quite hard water for carp and catfish. This was over a summer period of about 3 months. The purpose was to build up a ‘bigger picture’ of what happens when anglers arrive at a fishery, start fishing in a predictable way, bait up in a standard predictable way and then leave. I did this over a winter a different year for the same reasons which also gave a fantastic insight into fish behaviour in response to anglers’ activities and baiting up among many other factors. The biggest surprise of the summer fishing was the affect fresh baiting up had on fishing results. This fishery was a very hard-fished and heavily free-baited commercial fishery with some very large catfish and a few big carp too. This fishery was netted and had at least two thirds of its stock removed. As a result, daily catches for an experienced angler fell from possibly 6 carp of upper double size to over 35 pounds, to a usual result of a single fish or a blank day. Over the summer the visiting anglers unfortunately ‘blanked’ over 75 percent of their trips. The fish in this water became extremely sensitive to angling activity and would very obviously stop feeding if an angler did not approach the water with stealth and fish sensibly and quietly. For instance, anglers with lines running high through the water from their rods tips would ‘spook’ the fish out of their swims or would simply not get a bite, or only small fish. The same would happen to anglers who cast their heavy leads and rigs out much more than perhaps 3 times in a day. However, the effects of fishing 4 or 5 days out of 7 for me meant I could effect the fish movements to a great degree. Most importantly I could ‘educate’ the fish to eat my own homemade bait. The bait use was key but only in line with the natural fish feeding rhythms. Once this bait was established it became very difficult for the visiting angers to achieve bites on their competing baits despite them being popular commercial proven baits elsewhere. These baits had previously been successful at this water too. It seemed that provided sufficient bait of the one type was free baited, it could actually affect not only where and when the majority of the biggest fish would move to in order to feed, buy very definitely exactly which baits they would eat and would not eat. The overall effect of this long-term baiting for me as a single angler, was that it took about 12 weeks for the negative effects of hooking so many big fish, to really register with the fish before they became wary of the bait and fed in different ways on the bait instead of just eating it with great confidence in the outset. The natural feeding rhythms of the fish seemed to change from a previous and very obvious twice daily, morning and evening feeding spell when multiple fish would be caught by multiple anglers. The new obvious feeding pattern and opportunistic confident feeding behaviour became an infrequent 15 minute ‘binge’ at those times when the majority of anglers had left the water, or a good feeding spell every 3 or 4 days. This impacted on my results too. Even by baiting up and fishing very carefully and quietly, the carp would only get caught one at a time, perhaps one each day but the multiple catches of previous times were generally absent. Obviously, being a small water, the disturbance caused by the generally big 25 to 35 pound fish, would ‘turn off’ the feeding of other fish and send them up the other end of the lake. The catfish were equally elusive, mainly because there were so few in the lake and the natural prey small fish population really benefited from the removal from the lake of so many bigger fish. This period was very hard on the anglers who spent their money to catch fish but could not because they simply did not realise the effects that the current fish sensitivity to angling pressure had and the effect of a regular baiting programme had on fish bait preferences. I fact with any more than 3 anglers spread around this small lake, it would simply ‘go off the feed’ for everyone! However, it was extremely obvious the fish knew angers were not there. This is because after a period of totally fishless days with many anglers on the lake, within a half hour to half a day of them leaving, the fish would feed and would get caught – often when I was the last angler on the lake. At such times, multiple catches of the biggest fish in the lake often occurred. The effect of knowing how to fish that particular lake very sensitively and constant baiting up with well designed quality homemade protein based free baits produced un-equalled big fish results at the time. You may think that you simply have to fish on a water for days on end to get the results you want. Well this too was not true. Other anglers arrived with the same plan to bait up and effect the fish movements, but for some reason their boilies and pellets did not produce the regular big fish they were after. This really points to the dominant effect that one very well established particular bait can have for some time on a water, even when only introduced by one angler but in sufficient quantity. In fact the fishing only changed when the bait stopped being introduced and this is something very interesting to think about. Sometimes you will need to find ways to break the successful ‘monopoly’ that one bait might be having on your fishery. But of course, it does help if you know what that bait is. In my case no-one ever knew what that bait was. It is a good long-term advantage to keep your bait secret. Once the successful bait is known then there are various ways to change it to prolong its success, often by adjusting a flavour or attractor in it and even by soaking these into the bait is enough to do the trick with popular successful commercial boilies and well known ingredients, flavours, additives, oils etc. Simply adding rock or sea salts, extra betaine hydrochloride, liquid amino acids or vitamin and mineral supplements to the ‘going’ commercial baits can be amazing. Repeatedly freezing and defrosting these examples and or many others into your baits can produce many more bites when a dominant bait has been discovered which a fortunate few had been ‘emptying’ the water by using and which is beginning to slow down. But the best position to be in is where it is your bait that the fish turn to when they first start feeding. By using forms of pre - baiting to help position those fish in advance of their natural feeding rhythms, you will benefit greatly and still not have to fish for hours or days or weeks to achieve results. Baiting can be done while actually fishing but you fish a different are to the bait being fed in. Luckily, no bait dominates a fishery exclusively as fish have essential dietary needs and preferences which no one bait can ever completely satisfy for every individual fish. It is noticeable that some big fish get caught more often on one particular flavour and simultaneously a different big fish will appear to ‘prefer’ a completely different flavour or flavour combination and be captured repeatedly on this instead. When times are hard or when certain big fish have not been captured for a very long time, perhaps a completely new ‘angle’ on a flavour or attractor combination with a different focus on particular nutritional aspects of your bait like minerals and trace elements or vitamins, could be the answer you need. Even supplementing with more of a particular amino acid like lysine perhaps. Not following the herd is always the first and easiest edge to put into practice, followed by sustained creative thinking. The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches. (Warning: This article is protected by copyright.) By Tim Richardson. ‘The thinking angler’s fishing author and expert bait making guru.’ For ‘cutting-edge’ bait techniques see the expert acclaimed new ebooks / books: “BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!” http://www.baitbigfish.com
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