Fishing Hook Baits And Rigs To Target Big Carp and Catfish

* When it comes to using hook baits what does it take to ‘double or even treble’ your catches, on those more fishing pressured big carp and catfish waters? Let's see!

You are more than likely, representative of the majority of fishermen who fish for carp or catfish, and usually fish only one bait on the hook, or one bait of one type at one time. Doing this can rob you of ‘takes’ when doing things a little different to normal can pay off big-time!

Carp get used to dealing with conventional ‘hair rigs’ and catfish too get used to the single bait or big bait on the hook and it really pays to ‘ring the changes.’ This also can give you the opportunity to stimulate more of the fishes’ systems by using different food items on the hook. Then in time when perhaps one bait might not provoke a ‘bite’, then perhaps the other bait will.

A trout will take luncheon meat, but a combination of meat with a wriggling live worm is far more effective and take big barbels and carp too. The sound and movement of the bait are significant natural feeding stimuli to most fish we target. (Think lures, plugs, flashing spoons, divers, spinners etc.)

For carp, simply fishing a different bait over, or to the side of a bed of free baits could hook those wary bigger carp. E.g. A bird food bait fished to the side of fish meal free baits.

Double baits or using a sinking bait and a buoyant bait together on a hair, are effective but as more anglers use this rig, perhaps it’s worth looking for other alternatives that are flexible and easy to use:

Using paste or dough baits on the hair wrapped around a small pellet or boilie could make all the difference on many days.

Or even use one boilie or bait on your hair rig along with one ‘air-dried paste or dough bait. Or how about fishing more than one ‘hair’ on your hook. Use one boilie bait on one hair and an ‘air- dried’ paste bait on the other?

In fact, in winter this type of rig works wonders for shy biting big carp when utilizing a buoyant paste or boilie on a separate hair and a sinking boilie or air-dried paste bait on another. This rig can trip up the fish as it needs to take both baits into it’ mouth to get at even one and this time, there is no hair length to let it escape getting hooked as the baits sit right alongside your hook...

Using 'PVA' string with baits identical to your hook baits, is a great way to fool those big carp, and it works better if you make your 'free baits' lots of different shapes, sizes and densities by using different production methods. This really works and for example, I had a very good 'hit' of carp at 'Waveney Valley Lakes' in the UK, using this trick.

Another great edge is to mix up your free baits to 'confuse' the reference points of your fish. Carp get used to sampling one bait of one type and shape and size. But what if you constantly baited your swim with four different boilie types all in different sizes, shapes, flavours, densities and colours etc. And then you fished a totally different hook bait beside them? Give it a try on a 'hard' water and find out for yourself!

Very few fishermen use more than one or two types of mass free baits either. But it's very much in your interests to 'mix it up' and confuse the fish with different baits. Remeber, the more times a fish picks up your free baits, if there's any inefficiency about you hook rig, the fish will detect it and fail to get hooked, or even ignore your hook bait completely. Sometimes it is the weird case, that once a fish in a swim has ignored a hook bait, all the other fish become somehow aware of it and can steer clear of it too, leaving you wasting hours of dead fishing time!

Hook baits are merely a hook delivery system and there is no reason to get stuck using just one method, bait style or rig style. Changing beyond just the current fashions in fishing always gets you more fish and many bigger ones too!

The author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges’ up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on catches.

By Tim Richardson.

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