<B>Is your bait pulling in every big fish for miles? If your chum or ground bait is not you are seriously missing out and really need to exploit this vital element of successful fishing far more! </B>

The act of feeding bait into your swim while fishing or indeed before going fishing as in ‘pre-baiting,' is a cornerstone in effective angling. If you cannot pull fish into your swim and hold them there looking for food for any length of time, then there are very vital things going wrong for you.

If your fish do not become stimulated by your bait, they may not even ‘realise' that even your hook bait is in the swim. In many situations just fishing a single hook bait on its own will not be enough to produce satisfactory results.

If you wish to consistently ‘target' big fish, then it is advisable to get enough fish into your swim over a length of time, so that only the biggest fish are left competing for your bait. Otherwise you may keep on being pestered by the less wary smaller fish over and over again. (This is referred to, as the 'baiting triangle effect and is fanatastic for consistent big fish catches.)

If big fish are your goal and you only bait up with a minimum amount of ‘ground bait' or chum, then you may only hold fish for a very short period in your swim, before they leave the area. The biggest point is that your free bait needs to have a water soluble content in order to really stimulate your fish efficiently and effectively.

Big fish can eat very substantial amounts of food extremely quickly, and may require far more food to hold them than you expect! It is obvious that the longer fish remain actively feeding or looking for food or are in a ‘feeding stimulated state' that you will generate more chances of a ‘bite' even if this means your hook bait may be tested or sampled numerous times, by different fish, until one makes a mistake and becomes hooked!

If you really stimulate your fish with the use of ‘feeding triggering' ground baits and free baits, you are more likely to get ‘bites' especially from perhaps more wary big fish, than if they entered the swim un-stimulated first.

Feeding with ground bait that dissolves leaving only ‘traces' of dissolved attractors in the water have an advantage over ‘solid' ground baits, because odds are that fish will pick up your hook baits far quicker and there is no risk of ‘filling the fish-up' with free bait even before the fish finally eat your hook bait.

Ground baits that are ‘active' will promote more response from fish. This might mean adding live creatures into it, like worms or maggots etc. Or incorporating ingredients that will ‘cloud-up' and flavour the water, and rise to different levels in the water column as different ingredients of various buoyancies disperse.

There are many ways and means of offering free baits to fish. From the tried and tested ‘pre-baiting method' to the ‘little and often' regular feeding while actually fishing as with ‘match fishing.' However one thing is clear, even with the little and often method: it can very often take a large amount of bait over a period of time to ‘build-up' your swim and produce the greatest and heaviest catches of bigger fish.

Whether this applies to feeding your swim with gallons of maggots via swim-feeder, PVA bag, or ‘compressed ground bait stick' method, or feeding with pellets, boilies etc.

There are various ‘special' ingredients that can be added to your 'free bait' that will stimulate your fish from different ranges and some especially from long range, i.e. even over 100 meters away with the right water flow dynamics. This will also depend on the sensory detectors that receive ‘messages' from your bait and these ingredients are both very interesting and powerful!

A friend of mine had a trip to the famous big fish water, 'Lake Cassein' in the south of France and exploited the qualities of his 'free baits' catching a 50 pound carp! If you don't use 'free baits much or have a pretty 'stereotypical approach to chumming, perhaps you may consider being little more creative!

This fishing bait books author has many more fishing and bait ‘edges' up his sleeve. Every single one can have a huge impact on your catches!

By Tim Richardson.

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