My favourite part of fishing ......... Experimenting

I now have 3 bags of liquidised bread in my freezer one plain, one chilli and garlic and one spicy curry flavour, lets hope at least one of them work, has anyone else tried any experimental combinations with baits or made your own baits with odd flavours?

how will you know if one of your combinations was responsable for sucess or lack of sucess?????

will it be a fair test? If you fish with one of your combinations, you will fish it differently.

Something to bear in mind:

fish can detect levels of flavour at significantly lower levels than us humans - so long as you keep inclusion of strong smells to a minimum (barely detectable to your nose) you may produce a super bait that will outfish a 'normal' bait. strong flavoured baits can be an instant hit - then blow just as quickly - especially for carp and chub.

Aniseedy type flavours can work well in certain types of baits - just keep the quantities very small.

for consistant long term results I have every confidence in unflavoured versions of classic bait (maggots, bread, luncheon meat etc) as fish have been exposed to these baits in their normal form and view them with less suspician than a version of one of these that sticks out like a sore thumb....

I would agree with Chav prof about the flavor levels as its easy to think more is better and so you pile it on and you end up with a bait that has a smell so strong it will blow your head off.

I have watched Carp working round highly flavored baits and when the levels are too high its almost like they cannot « home in » on the bait as the small is just to strong all around it.

TimPaisly also wrote some good articles about this and one point he made that i thought was quite good was that you may like Curried chicken for example and if you really load it with curry the smell will be great but take one bite and its so strong its horrible and you wont come back for more.

I'm certainly guilty (or should that be notorious?) of using flavors and I'm very experimental with my baits and their application. Its very rare these days that I use a bait that is unflavored but my catch rates have improved significantly since flavoring my baits. A lot of it is to do with confidence and I always fish much more confidently with a flavored bait than an unflavored one.
For example dad catching his 5lb chub from a new stretch of river on spicy spam that I prepared for him has now put our confidence levels very high.
Did the flavor catch the fish or did the spam itself? Other baits including unflavored spam, cheesepaste, bread flake and crust (all in the same swim, in the same place) were completely ignored and it was only when changing to the spicy spam that we got bites. Still lots of unanswered questions here but I'm certain that it was the flavor that attracted that fish.
I've also got a tin of spam in my freezer that has been gently fried in Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce (sweet, hot and spicy a bit like bbq) prior to freezing. Looking forward to trying that out on Monday!

My main point is - if we hadn't have tried it would we have caught?

A good 5 or so years ago me and my mate did a night session for tench. As an experiment we bought 4 tins of luncheon meat, all the same brand, we cooked 2 tins in vindaloo curry sauce and left two as they were. We fished a double peg the entire night switching between the curried meat and the standard meat every cast.

That night we must've caught 25-30 tench between us, not one small than 3lbs and running to 5 or 6lbs. Every one of those fish came to the curry meat, neither of us even managed a bite on the unflavoured stuff.

So yeah, experimenting is good - it can really give you an edge when the fish have seen it all before.