Bigger Carp Fishing Catches On New Tackle Rigs And Bait!
Posted: Thursday, April 10, 2008
by Tim Richardson
baitbigfish
Fishing bait substances can be attractive, stimulatory or repellant! Often it is fish association with these angling activities that form ‘dangerous connections and associations' which negatively affect fish behaviours and feeding confidence. It seems obvious that baits with far less attractors, enhancers, flavours and feeding triggers etc are well proven to catch fish! Any bait with no significant substance with which to relate previous dangers (and no repellent substances either) will potentially catch. Making a bit of fake artificial rubber or plastic bait look and feel like a maggot or kernel of sweetcorn is pretty immaterial when compared to this fact!
My personal focus is on removing carp ‘danger reference points' especially in regards to conditioned angler use of tackle, baits and rigs (and most especially in baits.) With use of baits of your own, no-one but you can catch fish on them and in so doing condition fish responses plus you can easily be the first to use a new bait on the same water time and time again to catch big fish (as I proved with my 15 catches of forty pound carp and of the record big catfish from one of the Wintons lakes, etc.)
Any bait catches fish if only once; it would not be called a bait otherwise! A bait has only 1 ultimate purpose otherwise we may as well all stop fishing and instead simply throw bait into fisheries to feed-up the fish for their health and well-being! Even baits with no nutritional value or miniscule food ‘signals' catches fish. But much depends on fish conditioning based on previous negative experiences of being hooked, causing them to adapt their angler conditioned ‘danger reference points.'
A piece of plastic that emits a radioactive light is just another gimmick in my book. It is just a matter of catches and repetition before its effectiveness wanes just like all bait forms carp do not need in order to survive in a fishery! In direct contrast to a well designed balanced nutritional bait, do carp (or catfish) go around lakes deliberately in search of these bits of plastic or rubber, as in ‘fake baits?' I think not!
To efficiently tap into their ‘natural brain, nervous wiring and specialised receptor cells' and begin to manipulate their natural behaviour, exploiting their own finely honed natural senses and instincts, these all must be exploited against them! It is my belief that high or ‘balanced' nutritional value baits are not enough. Remember, it is the first person to use something that carp instincts and senses have never experienced before that have the greatest potential. Even well designed bird food and fish meal baits, where very successful for many years, can have incredibly surprising effects on the development of carp defensive behaviours in their presence in a swim.
Having observed carp actually move baits by holding them on the outside of their lips without any baits ever being taken inside the mouth. This can even be in order to move them to an adjacent area, to build-up a ‘safe food' area before consuming them! Carp love to squeeze baits and soft baits certainly have many advantages over harder ones that carp have become so skilled at dealing with anglers' baits, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on most UK carp waters! The methods they can develop of popping and squeezing baits out of the corner of their lips to test them (while looking at them) is a little unnerving to say the least!
Even though our brain and nervous systems have many specific differences to carp and we cannot really know for sure how a carp thinks or perceives, consider this:
Dogs know if an animal is missing from a group it hunts. This may not be counting as we know it, but it is pretty close. Our brains can adapt and use other areas of the brain when making connections in relation to counting even to the extent of someone with only a quarter of normal brain tissue still being able to function normally while a huge tumour grew in his head! We notice far less if something is missing, compared to something new appearing. Why is this? (Is it important to us in finding new ways to defeat the defensive senses and behaviours of carp and other fish?
It seems our spatial maps in our brains are highly sensitised to new information. (Consumers get so ‘turned-on' by new products!) We find it easier to gauge distances with objects moving away from, us as opposed to moving towards us. Many people are not very good at catching a ball thrown at them as a result, but who may throw a ball accurately! These things are all essential adaptations evolved to maximise our abilities in mobile hunting before humans cultural change to stationary farming communities became predominant.
Let's face it; if our primitive brain areas and newer constantly evolving areas did not have practical purpose and design, we would be extinct by now. It does appear there is much to be benefited from looking at clues in ourselves and fish behaviours and ‘hard-wiring' instinctive and habitual behaviour patterns etc, to produce innovative fishing baits and tackle solutions!
Creating a situation where carp confidently eat bait with as little natural caution as if it were a bloodworm or caddis fly larvae, tadpole or fish fry is a challenge which I do not feel most commercial bait makers are innovative enough about, considering their vast resources! But then there are so many practical implications and possibly buyer ‘perception' limitations, apart from financial risks etc involved, to take into account of. But it is certainly within the realms of individual anglers to tackle this area of fishing far more imaginatively with the huge potential for catch results this offers!
Anglers as a whole seem to automatically be drawn to copying each other. If they see some bait, method or piece of tackle or equipment produce fish; they want to do it or own it as well! This has been a massive reason why the bait and tackle industry has grown so big so fast in recent decades. The big drawback about this is the uniformity of anglers most often leads to a ‘standardisation' of thinking approaches or methods which have lost very many competitive edges. The way carp anglers fish in most countries today is pretty similar regarding baits rigs, tackle and ‘accepted thinking.
But in fact in the States, how we fish here in the UK is called ‘the English method' and it often differs so much from popular ‘standard' fishing methods in the States. These days in Europe the methods of catching carp are more diverse as more and more new anglers enter the sport and fishing gets even more competitive.
Very many methods baits and approaches are being over-lapped in get a ‘competitive edge.' Only a few years ago it would have been very rare to find an angler conventional ground bait for instance. Things have a cyclic pattern and every method gets ‘plugged' more as its success due to being new or different is exploited by the masses until it enjoys a mere fraction of the advantage it had over the majority in the first place!
Modern scientific method is all about reliable repeatability of experiments that create ‘reliable' results. The ‘spanner in the works' is where doing the experiment itself impacts in weird ways upon results, where the observation of the actual experiments somehow influences it as in quantum physics, strange anti-gravitational effects of certain forces etc. This things will just be regarded as ‘normal' when science has explained them and applied their benefits to our daily lives!
The peculiar thing about ‘conventional thinking and ‘established laws' as laid down by our scientific ‘establishments' and taught by our school systems is that science is only built upon what can be measured and by what we ‘think' we know today. The truth is that scientific establishment theories are proven wrong or incomplete all the time and many cases exist which prove existence of phenomena outside of establishment scientific laws and theories.
(These things get ignored or covered-up because they are inconvenient and such a threat to the dominant ‘establishment' system.) The case of dinosaur footprints with human footprints actually inside them which have been covered up to the extent of hiding such inconvenient artefacts (apparently by the ‘Smithsonian Institute') is one such example. Linear evolutionary theory is obviously flawed and not the only explanation for the diversity of life on earth.
At various points in our history ‘paranormal' would have encompassed examples such as:
a. The sounds from fishing alarms.
b. Isotopic fishing bite indicators.
c. Luminous ‘glow in the dark' fake corn and pellets etc.
d. Intense sweeteners.
e. Taste specific taste enhancers.
f. The effect of lecithins on oils.
g. The effects on food of ‘active enzyme' substances on foods and ingredients.
h. The preservative effects of lactic acid and vitamin C etc.
i. Smoked flavours.
j. Modern fishing lines ‘invisible' in water.
k.The distances modern fishing projectile products can efficiently throw baits.
l. Fluorescent bait colours.
m. Radio-controlled ‘fish-finding' bait boats and bite indicators.
n.Polyvinyl alcohol water soluble ‘disappearing' bait bags, netting etc.
o. Fish antiseptic substances.
A whole host of other fishing-related items and commonly accepted as ‘normal' ideas and were once beyond the realms of contemporary scientific understanding. Next time your mates give you a serious ‘ribbing' about your ‘alternative' baits, tackle, methods, approaches or ideas; put them to shame with your catches! The most legendary carp fishermen in the historic ‘Carp Catcher's Club' and the ‘British Carp Study Group' have always been the pioneering ‘original thinkers.' Maybe the greatest fishing edge of all is truly in developing the art of ‘thinking for yourself!'
You don't need to excellent at every aspect of fishing to become outstandingly consistent. Everything is relative to the skills, experience and attributes you have. It's the old ‘80 – 20 law' where the 20 percent results in 80 percent of the results. For instance on a big very heavily angling pressured water, becoming the furthest and most accurate caster and making the application of bait at range your area of expertise could be your ‘20 percent' as with Frank Warwick (among many other attributes.)
The leading anglers all have their own personal mix of attributes which keep them ahead. It may just be time availability and access to big fish waters, or it may be especial skill at casting long range and positioning single baits. It may be the amount of high quality conventional and ‘under the counter' baits they have access to, it may be fish location and bait application skills.
It may even be in chatting up the most skilled and successful anglers to ride on the backs of their success. It might even be their instinctive ability to think ‘like a fish.' Well whatever their foremost attributes are, somewhere on the most genuinely successful anglers shopping list is, original thinking but anyone has the capacity to use it to improve their catches. "Get it on!"
This fishing bait secrets 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: (3 total)I have not fished for many years; it is not something I really enjoy doing. You have much knowledge of the sport and that has made me curious. Is this your hobby or livlihood? If this is more than a hobby you are blessed to do something you love.
Interesting stuff - I like the inclusion of information about the scientific method. I'm not an angler myself but I found the insights about animal behaviour and sensory apparatus interesting and very readable!
Good article Tim. I have often wondered about dinosaur footprints with human footprints actually inside them. I would like to see an article on this subject.
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