May
26
When you use carp bait blind without knowing how it works you are using blind faith. In contrast, if you understood far more how and why key aspects of that bait induced bites and had the power to manipulate these potent effect far more then your catches will definitely improve. Read on to find out more…
Confidence in a bag, (or bottle) when it come to bait is one of great personal opinions for every angler, because the truth is everyone has different experiences even on the same baits, at different waters, and many anglers with put down other baits even though they have never even used them, which is a tad bit short-sighted perhaps. Confidence mostly comes from perceptions in fishing, and certainly not from first-hand experience. But it is first-hand personal experience that is the only thing you can truly trust as fact, but I do not mean by this that claims about commercial bait quality and effectiveness are not true.
Now you might wonder what all this confidence stuff has to do with actually knowing something useful about vital carp senses beyond appreciating that they like a bit of protein or a maybe have a flavour preference now and again. In terms of flavours, not all are the same! If I suggested that chilli powder can help your bait be detected from greater range by senses involving various specialised receptor cells and specialised canal pits along the lateral line (and in the actual skin of the fish,) this might be new to many.
Science is tricky and seemingly irrelevant for many anglers until they realise the enormous significance that chemicals change in solution with water and many substances are simply not the same in water as air, and fish are experiencing different chemicals all over their bodies and not just on the tongue like humans. Imagine garlic on the tongue; it is mixed with air and saliva, but in mixed just water, garlic produces different compounds and the tastes and smells we experience as humans will be different ones that carp experience. This means that the flavours or pungent smells we might imagine impact on the fish may well not be present in the same form at all, and this might mean that something else is triggering a response from carp, even an internal one where something in garlic is acting to produce thermogenic (metabolism and digestion speeding-up effects for example,) and even have very potent antioxidant and antimicrobial impacts etc.
Perhaps you might begin to think maybe something other than just smell and taste was influential and impacting on the carp; maybe something more profound, internal and physiological, or even psychological… To help clarify this big point, I ate a wheat-free biscuit (and wheat-free doughnut today!) Comparing the ingredients with the wheat-containing versions, the only substitution was that the wheat-free foods were based on maize flour, tapioca starch, soya flour and rice flour. All the rest of the ingredients in the wheat-free products were the same as the conventional wheat-based biscuits and doughnuts, including the fruit flavours, sweeteners, acidity regulators, (preservatives) and enhancers etc.
Now when I ate these foods, the bit that made me want another wheat-based doughnut or biscuit after eating the first one had disappeared from the wheat-free products, (and what a surprise and disappointment that was!) This meant that something beyond just taste and smell impacts was involved. Something that effected the release of those feel-good hormones in the brain were gone and I really noticed the difference!
Just imagine eating a food for years without that feel-good feeling after each morsel; making you want another one, and then eating one which does have this effect. Which one would you choose?! I don?t think you would have much choice; your brain will decide for you, and that is one reason why over-weight comfort food eaters who binge on cakes, biscuits, chocolate and many other foods, regularly can?t help themselves.
When you look, you won’t believe how hard it is to get away from wheat in your diet as it is exploited so much in modern foods to get you to eat more and buy more in regular, habitual ways! Even in carp fishing it is recognized that fish eating baits without supplemental nutritional foods can drop weight as with fish addicted to tiger nuts or peanuts alone, so using such things as part of your nutritional bait is a massive edge. You might not call it manipulating carp behaviors in your favor, or call it creating addictive or habit-forming behaviors, but it works in practice; you are your own guinea-pig every day! These edges are supplied to you by the bait secrets ebooks author with more experience of eating healthy biscuits and doughnuts (probably,) than any other author!
Tim Richardson.

