21 Big Catfish And Carp Catching Facts Of Fish Meal Bait Ingredients
Posted: Monday, March 31, 2008
by Tim Richardson
baitbigfish
If you want to catch big carp or catfish consistently, few baits and ingredients match fish meals. But how do you make them work best in all conditions and enhance any of them to keep big fish coming? These tips by an experienced homemade bait maker will prove very valuable!
1. Tinned fish make excellent baits. Putting them in a liquidiser and adding ordinary wholemeal flour and eggs is one of the simplest ways to make a fish meal bait!
3. Many fish meal fishing baits can taste sour or bitter and benefit from use of ingredients to improve taste, (and smell) and most importantly; ‘palatability' which can cause fish to ingest baits more repeatedly to create more chances of a hook bait being taken.
4. It takes roughly 4 to 5 tonnes of live fish in order to process and produce 1 tonne of fish meal, (fish have a high water content like us humans among many other similarities!)
5. Due to world-wide over-fishing, certain fish species used for human consumption and in fish meals, especially of the north Atlantic white lean fish like cod, haddock, whiting and pollack are more in short supply these days but their place is filled by smaller still very valuable fish species.
6. You can mix various fish oils together or with vegetable oils, to create your own personalised ‘fish feed inducing' oil.
7. Lecithins improve the beneficial dispersal of fish oils from baits when in water; making them far more ‘semi-soluble' and easier for fish receptor cells to ‘detect.'
8. Use of fish oils in low temperatures can severely inhibit fish bait digestion and even ‘lock-up' other less soluble ingredients which could sit in the gut and go rancid.
9. Often when fishing a fishery containing large catfish, having baited a swim with fish meal type baits can produce a ‘slick' of oil on the waters surface which can take some time to reduce depending on the oil content of the baits.
10. Often a fish oil induced ‘oil slick' can be confused with the large ‘slicks' which large catfish produce, (and the reverse is also true!)
11. Putting together a fish meal bait is very easy at the beginners level and gets more in-depth at the levels of optimising the digestive biological value and nutritional profiles of substances in the baits (especially involving first and second ‘limiting amino acids,' for instance.)
12. Ideal fish meal boilies and pellets and pastes should contain much reduced oil levels and exploit lecithins (like the commercial carp bait "Trigger Ice" for example.)
13. A good fish meal bait in winter (in contrast to summer) needs to have an open texture which allows soluble components to leach-out more effectively.
14. Using crushed egg-shells or crushed cockle shells adds much more than just more effective open bait texture.
15. The use of wheat germ, wheat and barley bran and milk proteins, are all beneficial digestive ingredients in cold temperatures either helping other ingredients to be absorbed or helping further natural bacterial enzyme of proteins for example.
16. When your simple straight fish meal bait loses some of its ‘edge' you can add to its nutritional profile by using various milk proteins, yeast powders, ‘Robin Red' additive type products ,or kelp powder for instance. (But there are thousands of choices and combinations to exploit while keeping a very favourable stimulatory nutritional value of your bait!)
17. You can rejuvenate the fish response to an already established fish meal bait, by adding various herbs and spices (which also aid more effective digestion and raise fish metabolism.)
18. Many simple baits based on cat foods and dog foods containing fishmeals and cereals make highly successful carp and catfish baits which are enzyme active and in the case of dogs, are most often than not, sweetened for added palatability!
19. Fish ‘oils' are liquid at room temperature but can solidify in cold temperatures so making normal summer type fish meal baits very ineffective.
20. You can test some of the ‘functional effectiveness' of your fish meal baits and pellets, by placing samples in a glass of cold water and assessing the time it takes for baits to ‘colour' the water in the glass and release soluble attractors you can smell.
21. The marine stocks of smaller fish used in ‘brown' fishmeals especially have stabilised and are claimed to be ‘sustainable' so it looks like these fishing bait ingredients are here to stay!
Although there are thousands of other bait variations, additives, attractors, enhancers, feeding triggering ingredients and substances etc, the basic fish meal bait and its nutritional profile is a proven winner for consistent big fish results!
This fishing bait secret books author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges.' Just one could impact on your catches!
By Tim Richardson.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Tim-great job breaking the points up-it makes it easier to read. Great tips and information!
Hi Tim. Nice lay-out. Very good tips to follow for someone who loves to fish. God Bless you, Teresa
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