psychodiagnostik

Hey sorry I just got around to checking this forum. I'm fishing High Rock lake system mostly. Sometimes in the lake at the boat ramps, but I prefer the smaller creeks that become wide and deep where they feed into the lake. Abott's Creek mostly.

After baiting all week in the mornings before work, I headed back to the spot Saturday morning before daylight. I only had time for another 4 hour session, but I caught six carp. The catfish worried me until atter the sun was up so all my carp were caught in a relatively short period of time. A snowman with Mainline New Grange and Mainline popup were the combo that worked, again with packbait method feeder. Still no big carp, I'm thinking there may be some big ones but 7-8 lbs seem to be the common size for this water. Indeed I caught my smallest ever, about 10 inches long. Work and home remodeling has been busy for a while, as soon as I get time I'll start another cycle of making bait/baiting and fishing. This session was definetely great as far as numbers of fish... then again, we've had a major drought, and this session was following a few days of overdue rain that raised the river by a foot. The water had been slow & dark, maybe the fresh current caused the fish to feed, or maybe a combo of that and dumping several pounds of bait per day for a week.

It looks like not much traffic in this part of the forum, however just in case has anyone explored Lake Hartwell? My father & I went there to catch striped bass, it's beautiful water. It reminds me of the videos of Dale Hollow. Like a lot of large North American impoundments, it's large at 45 miles long deep, max depth ~ 185 feet. Fishing for stripers from a boat we were regularly fishing 80 feet of water and the water's quite clear. Margins are straight and deep and where we were on the SC side there were few coves and bays. I know there's carp, we saw one dead common of ~ 10 pounds floating middle of the lake. It's a man made impoundment with huge expenses of water 100 feet deep over entire decades- old forests of flooded timber. I had been thinking about how the larger, northern lakes with predators yield the biggest carp in USA, and this lake has a massive, massive amount of stripers due to a stocking program where huge amounts of stripers along with herring to feed them are stocked each year. ever since it was discovered that both do well in the large, deep lake. We nearly caught our limit of large stripers in the 20 lb range in just a few hours, on live herring. The lake apparently holds large walleye & trout populations. So it's huge lake, intriguing from a carp angling perspective, but no knowledge that I' ve found on how to approach for carp

Not sure if the original OP is still around, but in this situation I'd try a "paylake" style setup, with a pack bait of maybe panko & cream corn juice plus a pack of jello powder and grape soda. Add soda until it becomes sticky and clumpy but not too watery. This is what works for me in pretty much every water I've fished, although you're leaving out the actual corn. It should make a really sticky, stiff moldable paste that will pack around a no-roll sinker or method feeder. Then, either hair rig or side hook a cereal puff like kix, corn pops, or similiar. The "carolina" style is to really bury the hookbait in a massive ball but in my experience, pop up style works too. In lakes and rivers where I fish, if carp are even remotely in the area, and are in any sort of feeding mode, this will draw them in if you're patient. This has worked for me when carp wouldn't touch a hook bait on top of a pile of corn. You need to make a lot of bait and re-bait every 30 minutes or so, give a sharp tug when you reel in to make any remaining bait ball falls off, and after a couple of hours you'll have a nice baited spot that will hopefully get the carp feeding competitively. Indeed I think wild carp in USA that are never pressured need to be trained to feed on boilies, which is what I'm working on at my local river. Be patient and don't react to liners, the rod tips will be going crazy if the carp start feeding, wait until you get a solid run.

As soon as I got my spomb I starting baiting several pounds of Mainline Grange boilies I rolled myself each morning, plus boiled feed corn each morning. Today I fished the first time after a couple of days baiting. I caught two small carp in four hours, one maybe three pounds on the same boilies I'm using to bait and other little one of about one pound on feed corn. These are the first carp I've caught at this spot after about three blanks, and these fish are typical for carp in this river system, carp are common but rarely do you hear of one over 10 lbs. I'm hoping that I'll get some bigger ones to hold in the area with continued baiting.

I've trout fished here in NC with a guide who catches carp on the fly... but he told me conditions needed to be correct, and he said he'd only done it during a mayfly hatch in late spring on one of our big lakes. Then, it's non-stop action from carp in a mayfly feeding frenzy, apparently in this mode they'll hit any mayfly pattern. My uncle has caught one on a black ant, a slow sinking wet fly, when catching bluegill on the spawning beds in summer.

I've seen it discussed in several older threads, but I figured I'd start a new one since I'm going to give boilies a serious try. I've just started carp fishing first of the year, & I've not had a ton of luck with boilies here in USA. From Luke's Cats&Carp channel, it seems that USA carp may need to be "trained" to take them. I have had modest results from combining my method feeder pack bait with boilie crumb, on top of piles of boilie and crumb, then a hair-rigged boilie hook bait. I use a pretty plain pack bait of instant oats, sweet corn & grape soda. What's worked better for me is corn hook baits fished on a pack bait method feeder, on a scattering of more pack bait & corn. I use both fake corn & boiled, bulk feed corn as hook baits. I've found boiled feed corn to be tough enough for a hook bait & also to work better than fake in late winter/early spring, but the catfish and turtles will absolutely worry me to death on feed corn in warmer months. They'll pick up fake corn too but not as much as the feed corn. What I am planning, is a long pre-baiting campaign with boilies on my local big river in the interest of helping the area hold some bigger carp. I'm going to go out every morning and bait one area with boilies and crumb then fish after several days or maybe a week. I ordered a spomb I'm going to try with my surf rod, I'll report back how it goes.

I've just started carp fishing here in NC this year, out of 16 carp across three lake & creek venues, one was a mirror. I follow a lot of southeast USA carp anglers and it seems to be similiar around here, a very small percentage would be mirrors. I did read a study that if you selectively breed for mirrors, yet introduce them into the wild, the environment can result in different genes expressing the scale patterns. So even mirror pedigree stocks can go back to scaled due to (I think) the protection offered by scaled. It definitely seems that certain areas produce more mirrors, so I wonder if the environment in which the carp live plays a part. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/carp-undergo-reverse-evolution-get-their-scales-back

Thanks for the welcome! Here's some pics from this year. Cats are a fact of life fishing on the bottom here, especially in summer. I've not found a bait they don't like, even fake corn.

Hi, I've been fishing for wild carp most of the past year, getting more and more into it after a lifetime of fishing here in USA. I've caught everything from bass, to trout on the fly, to sharks to seven feet in the surf, but carp has become quite the obsession & I've cared little for any other fishing during the last few months. I've been experimenting with different techniques, mostly method feeders in local creeks, lakes & rivers, using my bass & catfish gear with end tackle and bait from bigcarptackle.com . My PB is currently 14lb common. I've only caught one mirror compared to 15 commons, a small scaled one. Interestingly, we have a carp "scene" here in my state of NC, the "paylakes". They're small heavily stocked ponds that involve mini-tournaments. So carp fishing isn't totally unheard of in my area, but fishing for wild carp is extremely rare. I've not yet met another carp angler on my local rivers or lakes. I love learning about all the legendary UK venues via YouTube, podcasts & forums. I was fascinated by UK carp fishing as a kid when I found a book about it at our local library as an 8 year old, years ago, but then I forgot about carp until recently and rediscovered it with the help of the Internet. I loved the bank fishing taken to high art, unlike the local bass fishing scene, it was similar to the fishing that I did from the bank of my grandmothers farm pond for bullhead catfish and bluegill. I'm hoping one day to make it to the UK to wet a line. Anyways, I hope you all don't mind me lurking and posting occasionally in the Europe forums!