There are many ways to make very successful fishing baits without using flavours!

Freshwater flies, bloodworm, insect larvae, water snails, and all kinds of sea and freshwater shellfish like mussels etc, can all be incorporated into your fishing baits, giving a natural taste and crunch factor, and are available from many pet and fishing bait companies. The effect of adding ‘chitin’ based crushed shells of mussels or snails or prawns is not to be over-looked.

In nature these are not only natural foods, but actually provide essential nutrition to carp after being broken down be acids in the gut. This material may be confused with sugars or sweeteners like brown sugar, honey or molasses and perhaps this is why baits that are sweetened are preferable.

Carp eat water weeds too and these based on cellulose. In fact one very nutritionally effective bait ingredient is kelp, ground into powder or granular for for example. These two ‘bimolecular’ polysaccharides are the two most commonly found in nature and so you can see the carp’s gut and body are designed to extract maximum benefit from these foods.

Interestingly, carp can derive energy from plants by digesting this cellulose, and the molecular structure for sugar is very similar to cellulose. There also some interesting similarities in fats, and alcohols too which may explain some of their attraction to carp.

This point also concerns single celled aquatic life; namely algae. This is also an extremely abundant food a hugely beneficial source of protein and lots of other nutrients. You may have read ’spirulina’ as part of the ingredients in your goldfish, or koi feed.

Fish fry at times play a big part of carp diet; they will exploit any suitable abundant nutritional food source. Hence it is no surprise that carp get caught on fish meal baits and even whole fish hook baits meant for predatory species.

It is important, to make your bait as different as possible from the ‘normal’ for your water, to give you a competitive advantage.

As an example, I used a bait which was purely based on proprietary ‘coldwater goldfish food’ which instead of being the usual pellets form, was based on natural nutritional extracts like spirulina, impregnated into rice flakes.

I was using this bait as a test bait to find a successful alternative protein based bait. It incorporated daphnia (water fleas,) and spirulina (algae,) together; forming a truly ‘unique’ natural, alternative boilie.

I mixed the flakes with a small amount of semolina, as I did not know how much the flakes (based on ground rice,) would bind. After taking what seemed like literally hours to mould each individual bait by thumb and fore fingers, I convinced myself it would all be worth the effort!

I did not wish to ‘contaminate’ the bait with extra semolina binder and reduce its effectiveness. I prepared ‘hair rigs’ in advance of fishing and carefully dried the paste hook baits until they went hard and tough enough to stay on the rig.

At the lake, as it turned out, within half an hour of casting out, I hooked the lake record fish at that time weighing around 35 pounds in weight.

It was a valuable lesson in the attraction of alternative protein based baits, and the benefits of their use! This was on a fishery where extremely good quality milk protein and fish meal baits had dominated catches at that time!

So I definitely recommend you look into other alternative ‘natural extracts’ to add to your secret bait armory too. There are so many more bait edges to exploit!

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.)

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