Homemade Fishing Boilies and Recipes for Big Carp and Catfish!
If you are a beginner or experienced homemade bait making angler there are always new exciting things to discover to improve your results and keep ahead of the fish - and other competing baits! To make baits that work the very most consistently for big fish it takes a deep knowledge and long experience both in designing baits and in refining them to ensure they perform most consistently; and no-one knows it all! This article is about making nutritional big fish baits so let us look at a few important background details first!
The concept of making little round balls of food for fish like carp and other species has a very long history and even back in the sixteenth century and beyond there are historical references to such activities utilising various protein-rich ingredients, binders, sweeteners and enhancers and so on. In the UK Fred Wilton pioneered the modern version of making baits that delved much deeper into essential fish dietary requirements in order to exploit them to make baits that fish would find many highly attractive and stimulating reasons to consume to the effect that the more they ate the more they would want them! The HNV or high nutritive value bait approach is just one angle - these baits are rich but other baits can also hook fish although they may be far less nutritional as in the case of over-flavoured baits for instance; but readymade baits did not always exist and various other approaches to homemade baits work although usually you need to be a better angler to keep catching on instant baits compared to HNV baits!
Back in the days when fishing was extremely secretive the original HNV baits were built around caseins and other caseinates that provided extremely high levels of protein and stimulating and attractive amino acids that naturally turn fish onto feeding, although many other additives and ingredients were also used including liver, fish and yeast powders and meals etc. In the earlier days of carp fishing it was the milk proteins that had a dramatic impact on big fish catches for those making such potent homemade baits as readymade baits did not exist at that time and it was in later decades that fish meals and bird food baits and other combinations that really took precedence and making unique homemade baits is still incredibly popular