Building An Authoritative Travel Blog

Authoritative blogs seem all the rage at the moment but what exactly is an " Authoritative Travel Blog ?" Well my understanding of the matter is it is a blog that is not only very informative to the readers but that the information comes from authoritative type people in connection with what they are writing about.

Hopefully my articles below will give an insight on travel and travel related experiences from all over the world from many authoritative writers as they have been there and done that.

Articles will be and are published often and this means current travel experiences and up to date places to visit. If you have also visited these places or wish to comment then please do so remembering this blog is intended to family orientated visitors so please be respectful.

I have seen many fears raised through my article site and feel that any traveller today that, for one reason or another, decides against travel insurance then they are possibly being a little short sighted. We do not want our boats to sink but are happy to carry life rafts. travel insurance is a similar idea. We do not wish to ever claim on it but if things go wrong as they sometimes do it is a benifit to have the insurance.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Big Carp Baits And Improving Your Catches!

By Tim Richardson

How your bait can really make a big difference to your catches in hidden and very obvious ways!

Scientific tests on carp feeding and nutrition often involve protein-rich foods based on casein and gelatine, but you have to ask how many of these tests involve bloodworm, zooplankton, algae, mussels, snails, all forms of insect larvae and aquatic weeds fish etc that fish thrive on. Such natural food items are easily detected by carp due to evolutionary adaptation through millennia and carp can derive maximum nutrition from these foods and digest them very efficiently indeed, and we can exploit all this in our bait use and design! We can certainly improve our catches by exploiting not only the nutritional impacts of natural food items and their profiles of stimulating substances, but by how we apply our baits and manipulate natural carp feeding behaviours also!

When most carp anglers think about baits they most frequently think about flavours, protein or other nutritional aspects, but very many miss all the other aspects of bait that induce carp feeding behaviour and curiosity etc, in general. One important variable factor in our fisheries is the changing levels of the abundance of natural food items present which can impact upon catches on baits very much at certain times and we can exploit this to make catches easier with more focus on ground bait and bait design. It can be tough to induce natural feeding carp to eat our baits unless we truly exploit the biochemical systems and other senses which carp use to detect their natural food so effectively.

How things have changed in carp fishing since I began in the 1970's when most carp anglers caught single and double-figure fish and a carp weighing over twenty pounds was very special indeed and a thirty pound fish was a fish of a life-time and something of an object for closer scientific scrutiny! Where a can of luncheon meat or a loaf of bread used to catch carp, now many anglers will throw into their swim a couple of thousand boilies, many kilograms of pellets or particle baits and still expect to catch without waiting a week for all this to be cleared before getting a bite. The impact of the general trend towards use of more bait as free bait, chum or ground bait is often to do with improving angler confidence, but it can very much improve fish confidence too and when done appropriately seriously multiplies catches.

In the UK, there was a time a few decades ago when it was estimated that the majority of the fish weighing over twenty pounds existed in relatively few waters located in the North Kent area and having lived there myself, numerous villages there are certainly reminders of many famous carp waters from the 1970's and early 1980's period. Anglers starting carp fishing in the last 10 years certainly have great difficulty imagining just how much harder it was to catch fish of big twenty and upper thirty pounds going back even a couple of decades. Big carp existed in much smaller numbers in the UK and in only a relatively select handful of waters and this is why personal best fish of leading anglers in the 1970's and 1980's were so much smaller than those of today!

It is funny to think that once upon a time catching twenty individual twenty pound carp in a (UK) carp season fishing from June to March was a very tough goal, even up to 2 decades ago on most UK waters. But I know for certain this can be achieved in under a week on the right UK waters today. Bait know-how does make a great difference to potential results without doubt.



I recall catching 23 carp in 5 days averaging just less than twenty pounds, and topped by a mid-thirty from an Essex reservoir back in 1991. I know this type of result is very possible for anyone utilising good bait application on many UK waters today; especially now our UK carp stocks have grown on so much, especially during the last 20 or so years! If you understand more about bait and its application you can keep catching more when times are hard and also achieve outstanding results far more regularly, but avoid wasting expensive bait too!

Bait design is very important and the nature of the free baits you use in order to get fish into an excited feeding state and drawn into your swim, hopefully to make a mistake with your hook bait is crucial; even in exceptionally prolific French and Spanish waters where 60 fish of over twenty pounds has been achieved by my friends in just 3 days. In the UK high-profile anglers are very much promoters of innovative baits and applications and the leverage of various bait substances and forms of recipes is a very big part of their ongoing success. Bait is important not merely as an edge in itself but as the whole basis of your ongoing success and so belittling the subject is rather missing the point that carp senses can be manipulated in our favour over and over again big-time...

By Tim Richardson.

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