by Tim Richardson
Few carp fishermen realise that fish can switch their modes of feeding and you can exploit these and manipulate these to catch more fish! In fact you can make fish feed in the specific way you want by the form and size of baits you introduce as ground bait or chum making it ideal for far more natural and confident feeding leading to more bites.
Blood worms (and jokers) are notorious natural baits known for being banned owing to their extreme success at match venues. This is a good lesson to all carp anglers in how carp feed and exploit their modes of feeding. Fish like carp can feed in many ways, from dashing about after fry, to slowly sifting through silt for many hours with their heads totally buried. It makes logical sense to get to know exactly what your fish is eating at what time of day or night, where and why in order to fully exploit the form of feeding used at any point in time, or to even induce the one you wish the carp to use in order perhaps to hook them more easily by leveraging special bait formats and ingredients.
For instance, fish can harvest the extremely nutrient rich algae purely by sucking on stones and gravel. They can also particulate feed and filter on zooplankton and algae for instance in the upper layers of the water in spring and summer especially when building up reserves of energy before and after spawning activities. This reflects in the ways that fine bread and fish meal based ground baits can be fed upon in ways where the fish do not have to actually feed on the bottom, but consume it higher up in the water in suspension.
This kind of feeding or similar can be used to further explore the potential of your hook baits and free baits as food items even before your bait is actually touched by a fish. You might have seen a fish suddenly dart towards a bait after having started gulping in water first to taste your bait more efficiently using taste buds in the pharyngeal cavity in the gill area. Fish also use gulping in a snapping motion in a mobile pump feeding) or static position to filter feed and particulate feed and carp and bream do this much of the time in turbid lakes; lazy of what!
When filter feeding and using similar and related modes, carp can actually benefit from you baits nutrition and attraction without even touching them which definitely has its advantages if you use this to excite them fully before they actually feed. Such things as vegetable and fish oils, fine crustacean and milk extract powders and liver and digestive tract extracts for example, can all be exploited, but there are thousands of choices. You bait substances through carp filter feeding can induce a feeding frenzy state even before your carp have even swallowed a single bait!
It is natural for fish like bream, roach, carp, tench, barbel, and even bass and trout, to filter feed at times by capturing various sized food particles within their branchial sieves. However there this sieving can be adjusted in order to capture patches of fine particles or to capture larger single items and the characteristic speed of this feeding can vary between species. In the case of carp which are termed slow suction feeders, although they can suck up finer particles from one head length away from it at surprisingly high velocities indeed.
It often seems to be the case that carp fishing baits focus goes on chemical smells for instance which are very obvious to our senses, but it needs to be remembered that fish have extremely fine tuned lateral line cells which use electrochemical impulses in the detection of food items even by the tiny movements of zooplankton only 1 millimetre in diameter. The gape size of a fish’s mouth is normally not a limiting factor in efficient feeding, but the diameter of the area where the food is chewed is and it is often far less than the gape of the mouth. Therefore its makes sense to exploit this and use smaller baits than often recommended. In fact carp in turbid lakes predominantly depend on food which is in particle size, so why not go with this approach not against it!
Smaller food items can naturally be passed to the throat teeth in mouthfuls without any problem and of course the more energy efficient the food delivery system is the better. It can often be the case that small baits are the preferred choice of more experienced big fish anglers because they can see the benefits of smaller food items in regards how fish feed on such baits and also their more natural weight, size and movement in water when combined with a correctly balanced hook rig. I find boilies in the 6 to 8 millimetre size excellent for bigger more wary fish even with huge mouths!
How many big carp get hooked by match anglers at the end of a day of baiting up constantly with tiny pouches of fine bread crumb and fish meal and tiny micro pellet ground baits; it happens far more often than carp anglers like to imagine. The constant ground baiting is one factor along with the fine tackle they use, but mostly, match anglers are offering carp the ideal form of ground bait to exploit their natural filter feeding modes. Literally matching up your bait to the feeding modes of fish and even influencing which mode and feeding intensity occurs can seriously improve your catches all season; it just takes a little bait know-how…
By Tim Richardson.
About the Author:
Big fish bait secrets: “BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!” And:
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