UK Carp Fishing Bait Secrets Of Getting More Big Fish Bites!
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It will probably come as a surprise to many fishermen that fish alternate frequently between one feeding mode and another, in order to best profit from various food opportunities available in the aquatic environment even within a short time period and this can change many times even over an hour or 24 hour period. The way fish feed is key to how best to tempt them in order to get a hook in their mouth and catch them, but few anglers actually give this immensely important subject the attention it demands. But the good news is that you can induce many fish feeding modes simply and easily in order to catch more fish purely by exploiting what comes naturally to them…
It is well-known that jokers and blood worms have often been banned as baits from various fisheries because they impact upon the feeding behaviour of fish so much. Many species of fish and in particular the Cyprindae genus of fish, have many adaptations which help them switch between modes of feeding to exploit the higher profitabilities of one mode over another, depending on which forms of food are available and where they are located in the water or bottom sediment.
Many carp anglers do not realise carp can feed on items as small as algae and tiny zooplankton crustaceans, even under a millimetre in size and derive extremely significant nutrition from such small organisms. These are very rich foods and are often exploited when fluctuations of populations are especially favourable and in spring and summer help in the time leading up to and after spawning. The success of fine particulate feeds like fine fish meal and bread crumb ground baits in many ways echo this mode of feeding which in this case can occur at any level in the water or sediment.
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.
Carp actually derive very significant nutrition by filter feeding as this is the primary mode of feeding used especially in turbid lakes. It is a great advantage to use this mode to good effect, and I have had outstanding success for bigger carp fishing over ground bait and forms of more soluble boilies and pellets forms over deep silt in smaller turbid lakes; where catching filter feeding carp can be very difficult with more conventional approaches and large baits and pellets etc. This method of feeding exploitation can drive fish into a feeding frenzy even though no solid bait has actually been consumed yet!
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!
It often seems to be the case that carp fishing baits focus goes on chemical smells for instance which are very obvious to our senses, but it needs to be remembered that fish have extremely fine tuned lateral line cells which use electrochemical impulses in the detection of food items even by the tiny movements of zooplankton only 1 millimetre in diameter. The gape size of a fish’s mouth is normally not a limiting factor in efficient feeding, but the diameter of the area where the food is chewed is and it is often far less than the gape of the mouth. Therefore its makes sense to exploit this and use smaller baits than often recommended. In fact carp in turbid lakes predominantly depend on food which is in particle size, so why not go with this approach not against it!
Smaller food items can naturally be passed to the throat teeth in mouthfuls without any problem and of course the more energy efficient the food delivery system is the better. It can often be the case that small baits are the preferred choice of more experienced big fish anglers because they can see the benefits of smaller food items in regards how fish feed on such baits and also their more natural weight, size and movement in water when combined with a correctly balanced hook rig. I find boilies in the 6 to 8 millimetre size excellent for bigger more wary fish even with huge mouths!
If you exploit the various filter feeding modes of fish using various grades of ingredients both soluble and insoluble in your ground baits you can certainly induce far more intense and suitable feeding for hooking wary big carp. You might recall the fact that fish are lateral lines are tuned to feel the movements of live foods like maggots and sound is important in ground bait effectiveness, but smaller hook baits are well recommended in conjunction with this. With carp one thing is for sure and that is when you leverage their mode of feeding or preferably specifically induce particular modes of intense feeding, you can vastly improve your catches all year round and all you need to know is a bit more about effective bait use and ingredients manipulation…
By Tim Richardson.
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