Geo Travel Blog

Big carp and catfish have been caught on very cheap but extremely effective sausage meat baits for decades. Homemade sausage meat baits and ground baits are enormously cheaper than many shop-bought baits and expensive popular luncheon meat and Pepperoni products. Let’s see how to make yourself some big fish baits that really save you money and catch big fish!

The first ideal part about sausage meat is how cheap and easily available it is. It comes in various forms and grades and as usual it is best to get the freshest product possible. This kind of meat is just not fashionable today which means right now is a perfect time to be exploiting it!

Sausage meat is very simple and easy to use and you can either mince it up or use the minced product. The nutritional value of pork sausage meat is very stimulatory to both carp and catfish and has a fair proportion of those important fish stimulators; amino acids and oils. Pork sausage meat is often made with bread crumbs and it is very simple to make a bait by simply mixing it with eggs and very cheap wheat flour for example, although other more nutritional binding flours and meals are very numerous, to help bind bait into a dough.

To make these economical protein based baits is fast and very easy!

For example, using half a pound of minced sausage meat, mix it in a bowl with about 3 to 4 large hens eggs and around 2 table spoons of ordinary cheap wheat flour (or more if required) and kneed this into a stiff pliable dough. This can be used as fishing bait immediately as paste, or you can bag it up in bags with a tie to make the bag air tight and store in the fridge or freeze it for use next session. This bait is pretty much instant on most carp and catfish waters even though various meat brands and grades may very results and although very basic and simple will produce lots of fish.

Putting regular batches of baits in swims is a very good advantage to get fish to really respond to your new bait. (You do not have to do this using sausage meat as it is mostly instant acting; but why miss a good trick!?) If you put out golf ball size baits a few times into swims before using it, then fish will eat this safe bait and it will definitely improve your results come the time of using when you do fish with it!

When you pre-bait fish will obviously get a smell and taste of it without getting hooked so be more confident when you do try it on the hook, so do it! You can use sausage meat baits as part of your ground baiting or with other meat baits like chopped spam, meatballs, luncheon meats if you want the extra expense; sausage meat and cheap rolled oats is fine! Scald or boil or steam your baits if needed where smaller fish prove a bother, but add some paste to your bait on your rig or on the hook to boost more soluble attraction…

You might make your boilies from small half inch odd shaped pieces and these odd baits will have a competitive edge over all those expensive uniformly shaped machine-rolled baits! Just get a half pan of water boiling and add a handful of baits at a time usually for about 2 minutes on average before removing them. Use handy towels or papers (or special drying trays from Gardener tackle) to dry your baits and remember to keep your water boiling at all times.

The proteins in the eggs in the boilies coagulate more with more boiling to make your baits harder, but you might add other substances to harden or toughen your baits; such as blood powder which also adds valuable stimulatory nutritional attraction. The choice of other additives, ingredients, flavours etc is vast, but choosing these is very much a science and art! Anything you add is better based on a little investigation of what truly triggers fish feeding and what has not already hammered your water, rather than a quick trip to the local bait shop first as this can end up costly and even counter-productive to your financial goals!

As sausage meat is a fatty, oily bait, incorporating additives and ingredients and flavours to boost digestion and fish metabolism is a very good idea indeed. You might simply add spice and herb powders, any of a range of essential oils and extracts, or boost attraction with parmesan or blue cheese powder and added garlic granules or seaweed granules etc. Adding some liquid amino acids supplements is always useful in boosting nutritional attraction and this can be made at home very easily although it’s not for this piece. For colder weather you might add liquid lecithins and add oat or wheat bran which improve digestion, liver function and the vascular system of fish being rich in the feeding trigger, betaine!

The choice of ingredients, additives, flavours, taste enhancers etc not only bewildering for most anglers, but often expensive. It is a giant money-saving edge when you know what you are really adding for exactly what direct or indirect purpose in stimulating fish digestion, or to enhance responses at fish receptors and the brain to induce more intensive feeding for instance. Whatever you use, be it a bioactive flavour complex, or simple monosodium glutamate or anchovy source, often keeping things cheap will provide many hidden edges over anglers commercial baits which may already have peaked as it were…

Fishing baits which are based on substances that trigger fish feeding and fish metabolism among many other things are well recommended, but you need to get to know the details of this to exploit them most cost effectively, but remember the advantages of using a popular commercial bait is lessened by far when fishing against more experienced, talented, full-time moneyed (or bait sponsored) anglers! Homemade baits like those based on very cheap sausage meat work against those highly hyped baits that cost a fortune (even if they are enzyme active etc,) and will catch you lots of big carp and catfish: fact. Obviously the more you get to know about bait the more edges you can have which save you a fortune and keep producing better than average catch results, and cheap baits are not necessarily crap baits; but the complete opposite so keep reading!

By Tim Richardson.