FLAVOURS DO WE NEED THEM?

You can not talk about bait long untill this word "flavours" come up! wot flavour did you catch that on mr?

I have always started field testing on baits with no added flavours working with the quality ingredients and the liquid foods contained in the base mix as the foundation of any designed bait. This shows a better and often true picture of the baits performance long term.

Back to the post and question do we need flavours in the baits long term?

This is going on, on other threads also, my opinion, flavour for the angler, ingredients for the carp.

Is there evidence to surgest that once you have tested a bait flavourless that once you add flavour it gets better? Have you seen this Mr Opus? Serious question.

I have found that the non-flavoured mix does pick up the better fish and more takes on the difficult waters and allow heavy baiting up on a session.
The flavoured mixes produce quicker but smaller fish at the start and is more suited to runs waters or silty waters and canals but over a long period of time the fish have been of better size but less fish compared to the flavoured version on the same lakes.

Its long term that I look at but,,, the problem is that every one wants flavours.
I have a mix called DUB MIX that is based on LT-94, Pre-digested fish meal, soluble fish meal, liquid fish, fish oils designed 10 years ago for a difficult gravel pit water. The people that have looked at it have said could you do it with pineapple in it?

I think that people are simply more confident with flavours in the bait and think short term and why not a few fish on your day off work great fun!...

That's an eye opener, thanks opus.

we to have the same problem opus,we only have three baits that we do each with its own bespoke basemix and yet time after time all we get asked for is can we change the flavour and the colour,my first question to those is why? and to be honest they dont really know why,i even know of bait companies that have there bags flavoured to catch the angler!!

If you start going down that route EBC of specials where do you stop?...

I believe we need flavours,okey you might catch on unflavoured bait but at the end of the day there is still some flavour there in the base mix. Fish have several times more powerfull senses than humans so it may appear unflaveroured to us but they have the ability to pick up almost every ingredient that goes into a boilie. Some people may say "yeah,but i caught it on a washed out bait" it may appear washed out but not to a fish with the more powerfull senses.You could have the best base mix in the world,but should it become contaminated with the smallest amount of flavour that fish dont like,such as soap,bleach,deoderant,bug spray etc you wont catch jack dish on it. I believe flavours make it easy for a fish to find the bait(you just need flavours they like,but are not used to) i would also like to suggest that bait companys try steaming boilies they would give off a stronger flavour,it works with our food with our senses,it might just draw more fish in!!!

A good base alone will catch carp and therefor the easy answer would be no. However certain chemicals are very attractive to carp and will quickly point them in the right direction. I am not talking about "what a lovely pineapple smell" in this instance I would be talking about ethyl buytrate. I blend my own flavours and everything in there is on it's own merit and is a proven catcher of fish. Quite often I start with certain elements in different ratios and just see what I end up with.