How do you get even more bites from bigger fish? The answer is give them more of what they essentially need by leveraging nutrients as one example in your baits, by adding readymade easily-available high protein liquids. With over 3 decades of experience using liquid foods I can tell you a few of the best and how to use them to best effect; so read on!

If you want to boost your catches or make your baits pull more fish packing your baits with essential amino acids and betaine is easy although far from limited to just these. The daily requirements carp have for all kinds of nutrients means that we have a vital area of leverage to exploit. It is logical that carp are extremely sensitive to substances that keep them alive – betaine is one of them! (In fact we humans have an essential requirement for betaine too and it is found naturally in our tissues.)

Now if your baits have enough good reasons for carp to consume them they will have many advantages over a range of less nutritionally-stimulating baits.

But do remember that nutritional is only one part of bait formulation as many substances which are not directly nutritional in nature can very much influence fish responses and behaviours in the short and long-terms.

Whenever carp are possibly deficient in any of their essential nutrients, the inclusion of many of the most stimulatory of these nutrients in sufficient levels may be just enough to achieve a hooked fish when less nutritional baits may well fail.

The Rod Hutchinson brand is the oldest established bait company in carp fishing, and started in the late Seventies. If you want to know a few of the names that epitomise the pedigree and success of this company just consider just these 2 giants in terms of carp bait flavours namely, Scopex and Monster Crab.

Other great flavours I have used with very satisfying and consistent success over the last 3 decades include:

Megaspice, Mega Tutti Fruitti, Maplecreme, chocolate Malt, Strawberry Cream and Pineapple Cream, Secret Agent and Mulberry Florentine.

I wish to give Rod his well-deserved dues in recommending his completely trustworthy nutritional supplements which have caught me loads of bigger carp and other fish in all kinds of baits for 30 years. I have added various of these to my homemade boilies, pellets, ground baits, particles, natural sea food baits, meat and other baits, plus used them to top readymade baits of many of the big UK bait companies. My list includes:

Shellfish Sense Appeal, Regular Sense Appeal, Maplesteep Liquor, Amino Blend Supreme, Aminos Blend Swan Mussel, The Liver Compound, Compound TF, and Solutein.

There is a wealth of very productive and long-proven liquid foods and flavours available and please take note of this lesson. Some of the best products Rod Hutchinson ever brought out ended up being discontinued because shops wanted to condense their range of bait products. Some of these withdrawn flavours were some of the very best that Rod has ever had but had yet to become legendary in public perception. By all this I mean that there are definitely giants like Scopex and Minamino out there and it is up to you to experiment and decide which products you are going to make legendary through your catches and resultant opinion! Experimentation in bait-making is highly productive I can assure you! Some of the flavours I am also very keen on from Ccmoore, include:

Anchovy Extract, Ultra Green-Lipped Mussel Essence, Ultra Peardrop Essence, Ultra Belachan Essence, Ultra Bloodworm Essence, Ultra Cranberry Essence, Ultra Tuna Essence, Ultra Tangerine Essence and Ultra Honey Essence, (among others.) I have recently been doing very well on a combination of Ccmoore Crab Essence mixed with Frankfurter Essence plus various essential oils and other liquid extracts.

Ccmoore have become well-renowned for their liquid food supplements like the Rod Hutchinson brand and some of these liquid foods are really becoming legendary in their own right. Ccmoore have 12 generations-worth of animal nutrition and feed experience going in their liquid food supplement designs and this background is an indication of their potency! Some of the Ccmoore liquid foods I have used with complete confidence and great success especially when targeting bigger fish include:

Feedstim XP, Marine Amino Compound, Red Venom Liquid, Bloodworm Extract, Mussel Extract, Liquid Super Slop, and liquid Salmon and Krill – which is a genuine legend in the making. You can use these either individually in any of your baits or in mixtures as I do. (Your baits really do become fish magnets!)

The secret in using natural liquid foods is in keeping them present in high enough levels in your swim, at all times and this is connected very much to your free-baiting skills and experience and the profiles of the baits you apply in terms of free amino acid-based liquid foods and other naturally soluble extracts etc.

Rod Hutchinson used to recommend low levels of his Regular Sense Appeal around 30 milliliters per pound of base mix early on as I recall, but I put lots more in and my results got better as a result. It was a real breakthrough for me to discover I could add loads more liquid attraction to my boilie base mixes than just the 5 millilitres of flavour and perhaps 30 milliliters of liquid foods.

This success illustrates that thinking about your baits, avoiding standard recommendations and experimenting yourself can really work well! This is especially when your homemade baits and fishing experiments are based on real-time catches-feedback. This means you will know very quickly exactly when you have a winner! The impregnation of machine-extruded pellets with nutritional oils improves their attraction and similar things work in regards to flavours, liquid foods and a range of baits including readymade baits, homemade boilies, pellets, particles, meat and fish baits etc.

Watering down your eggs with liquid foods and other liquids means your baits work more like pastes as they become more water-soluble and are both able to adsorb and absorb water far better into the bait as well as leaching far more liquid attraction. These few factors alone seriously boost bait performance. For more information see my biography!

By Tim Richardson.

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