ripslider

Vintage?? hmmm... I don't think I am. Maybe I am compared to the likes of Mercers Hearn and Jackson, but I do like to have nice things, but only if I can justify buying them. Harrision blanks, Prodigys, Bait runners and a complete 2004 Greys fly outfit for the carp and pike isn't TOO old, is it?? I was thinking about this thread today. I figure whats happening is that 80% of the people who read this thread, and others that I've written in, either think I'm an idiot or a lunatic. 10% know what I'm talking about becuase either they choose to fish like me, or, more likely, are limited financially as to how they can fish. Simple is also cheap, and 10% are thinking about what people like me, common hunter, salokcinnodrog are saying. I think that "thinking" is better than huge numbers of hours on the bank. I also guess it's cheaper. Good Lord it needs to be when it's time to take the missus on holiday and she needs new clothes!!!! However, lots of people get a lot of pleasure from fishing long sessions and being away from it all, being confident that their bait is still on the end of the hook and enjoying the time to relax with fishing. I'm like that too sometimes as well. I'd be interested to see what people who read this thread are thinking about what, really, is a heresey to modern carp fishing. Do people think that what we're saying is right, wrong, misguided, making them think, making them angry?? Steve

A dead anything can't spawn. Anywho, no one here is killing the cray fish, so it doesn't matter. Steve

Yes, your right. When I need to use my Prodigys and bait runners, I do as well, but I only use them when it's exactly the right way to fish at the specific time, and in that specific place. As for side hooked baits, I use a hair rig for Pike more than carp. Again, it's a specific tool for a specific problem, but I'd say 80% of my fish are caught with a normally hooked bait. Have I summed up anything? Maybe, but I guess it's stuff that everybody already has in their heads, and doesn't use. As I said, Simple is not always right. I just think that it's more often "right" than additional complication makes a fishing problem. Have I let the cat out of the bag? No, it's been out for years if you look for it. Sherringham was writing about it tens of decades ago, Walker, Stone, Drennan, Ingham, Yates, Wilson, Bob james, they all refined it and thought about it more, but they were still left with the three rules of fishing. Location, Bait, Rig. In that order. On the lakes I discussed below, most people fish in a specific way, and a good session is maybe 2 fish in 48 hours. I fish in a different way, and I expect 2 fish in six hours. That's not bragging, my fishing partner also expects the same amount of fish, and generally does a lot better than me. We can do it becuase we traded thinking on the toilet and in the bath ( please note. NOT TOGETHER!!!!) for time on the bank. Everything that anyone needs to quadruple their catch rate, and I really swear that quadrupling is totally possible, is sitting in the library. Why build new things, complicated things, when the simple things have been honed to perfection by the greatest minds that angling has ever had? We all borrow idea's from each other, from books, DVD's and magazines forums. These idea's say "This is a way to catch a fish" However, there is a second world of information available, if you look for it, that says "Think, and then fish only after you've thought, and here are the tools you need to help you think". I want to catch carp. Lots of other species as well, but carp are my second favourite fish, and I want to catch a lot of them. I figure that Carp took up most of the time of most of the people on the list above, and they were damn good at solving the problem of how to catch fish, so I should listen to what they have to say. If there is a cat to be let out, then maybe, sometimes, it's that carp are a lot easier to catch than people think. Sometimes, and again I'm thinking of things like the withy rigs, and the d-ring rig, the carp seem to be caught in SPITE of the rig, rather than becuase of it. I guess the acid test is "Would I fish for a Dace or a chub, which really are difficult, spooky fish to catch, with a scaled down version of this rig?" My personal opinion, for all that it's worth, which is not a huge amount, is that every time the question "What rig should I use" is asked, then the first thing to do is ask if the solution can be found with hook to line and nothing else. If the answer is no, and that is not a huge number of occasions, then the "best" rig should be looked for by adding a single piece of kit to the rig at a time, to solve a single specific problem and ensuring that there is a totally solid reason why it's being added, and that there is no simpler solution ( i.e, I want to floater fish at range. I could use a controller, but that has weights, swivels, needs beads etc. I can do the same thing with a piece of stick from the bank, and the carp are a lot less wary of a stick than something sitting perpendicular in the water, painted black and orange and with dangly bits of brass on it ). Tackle for tackles sake, with no reason behind it, adds difficulties, and difficulties equals less fish. However, that's my opinion only. terry Hearn has caught a lot more, bigger fish than I have, and he uses complicated, to me at least, rigs. But if, for example, Peter Thomas were to fish the same waters for the same time, as Terry did, or Richard Walker did, who would put money on Terry Hearn having as high, or impressive, catch rate, was Thomas or Walker would? Steve

Turn the question around. I fish fish "good" lakes (and lots of less "top" ones as well ). Two of them have thrown up high 30's before, and I have caught low thirties ( twice, but still Plural !!!) there. Both lakes takes a pretty heavy hammering, and are "trendy" lakes. More time is spent talking about rig design and the newest bait than actual fishing it seems sometimes. Then there is me. I fish there with a single rod, which I've re-built myself, to work in exactly the way I want, but looks shoddy as anything, a small reel, a fly vest with my bits in, a net and a peice of black neoprene to sit on. And that's it. It it doesn't fit in my vest, or a rucksack, them I'm not interested. Don't get me wrong, I do fish buzzers and chair styles of fishing, but not really for carp, and never on these lakes, as they don't need it. I fish really simple rigs. I free line and touch ledger with an arlesey bomb, split shot and hook. I fish the float, both the lift, the slider and using a pole float for the margins. I use a balanced ledger when i'm in weed and if bites are shy, I'll use a paternoster, like is used for feeder fishing for bream. For floater fishing, I tie a twig or piece of stick to my line. I get a LOT of abuse for this, especially from people who haven't seen me around before. Maybe abuse is the wrong word, mockery might be better. There is a lot of jeering, but I'm not bothered, I'm there for fish, not to be considered cool, although it would be nice if I was. I don't fish like this to make a point, and nor becuase that's the either technical or financial limit to my angling. It's becuase that's all I really need to catch some fish on these lakes. I don't need a chair becuase I'm moving every 1/2 hour, or whenever I've had a fish. The mat also keeps me really low, and if your really low, you naturally stay still better. It's also a good unhooking mat. The rigs I fish are "different", and different helps. They are also totally simple, with at most two knots and so two points of failure. I make up for my lack of groovey kit with as much water craft and pre-planning as I can although there is still a LOT to learn. And I go expecting to catch two fish, and hoping for three, and I'm usually on target. This is either in an afternoon/evening or early morning session. At most 6 hours. I try and follow the three rules of catching fish. Find the fish. present them with a bait they'll take. Have a rig that will hook and land the fish. No matter how good the rig, it won't find the fish, I need to do that. So I move until I find them. I use a bait they will take, and I figure that if they get hooked on boilies and corn a lot, I should use something else, and I fish the simplest rig I can, becuase for every complication I add, my reasoning says that that's another point of potential error. Lots of the anglers think this is a hard lake, and maybe it is, but not if you pull it to pieces and solve the problem by being willing to use what ever pieces of idea seem exactly right for the problem to be solved. I would say that fishing into a single pitch is a level of complication before the session even starts. River fishing for carp is hard, that takes a lot of different types of skill and requires some additional complications, ( like having to think about countering the effects of wire traces when dead baiting ( try it, honestly, for river carp one of the very best baits is a dead minnow, but so do perch and pike sadly ) keeping baits away from chub, natural presentation in a flow etc etc, ) but this specific lake is easy enough if the rules that everyone knows are followed. Still a challenge, but that's why I fish. I guess a lot of people who read this are thinking that I'm some sort of Chris Yates character. I'm really not. I'm totally happy with almost all area's of tactics that modern carp anglers fish, apart from Lead core and fixed rigs, which is a purely a personal choice, and i use the same methods as well, but when it's exactly the right method to use. I'll start simple, and slowly add complexity until it's needed. However, in waters where complex is the normal way of fishing, then simple ALWAYS gives an advantage, as long as you go simple enough to start with, and trade less complexity for more thinking. I think more thinking is the key. Did anyone see Terry Hearns write up of how he used compost for his margin fishing? That's an awesome idea. He still used, by my thinking, pretty complicated rigs, and my gut feel is that he didn't have too, he could have just fee lined a bunch of worms for example, but he made his life easier with thinking, rather than going to the next level of complexity in his rigs, which a lot of other carp writers seem to do in their articles. The Withypool rig seems an example of this. Prior to Mary, the last two british records were caught on free lined lump of balanced breadpaste, and a freelined hook of three grains of sweetcorn. Steve

If you were a bad person, then you would know that if you net a few cray's, and then put them under your boot to kill them, breaking up their shell and making a mess in the process, and then you throw this big handful this in 10 yards down stream, for even canal's have streams, and then did the same upstream, then within an hour you would have a drastically reduced cray problem, to the point when you could probably fished a popped up worm, or boilie, with relative ease in about half an hour, which is as long as it takes to set up and have a smoke. However, you'd have to be a bad person to know this, because crays are a protected species, and so what the bad person did was bad, even though it was effective for a few hours, until the bad person had to do it again. However, becuase I'm not a bad person, I wouldn't be able to comment. Less bad people would get a couple of hessian or woven plastic bags, fill them with £2 worth of liver ( Which is a LOT ) and some stones, tie a rope around the end and haul them into the near-side edge of the main channel about 10 yards or a practical distance from your swim, either side. bad people would say that this isn't as good at keeping away cray's, but still helps a lot. again, I can't comment, but would say that if you got bored with carping, using either method, you'd be mad not to take that carp gear, swap to a very very running lead, and then fish popped up worms maybe 3 inches above the deck near where you put your liver, or where the bad person throw the smashed up bag of cray fish. That way, you'd be able to put the scariest bend you've ever seen into that rod of yours by catching a 5lb eel. Were you to do this, I'd reccommend the use of 15lb line and a long soft braided hooklength that is abrasion resistant. Steve

hmm... maybe I got too detailed. Float fishing is way to catch good fish, and a way that I think is a good and practical way, but many others don't. Legering, with the multiple rigs you read about here is another way. fly fishing another. So is floater fishing, using small lures/spinners and even, especilly in rivers, dead baiting with minnows or bull heads. Match tactics are also pretty deadly, even on the hardest of specimin waters. ALL of the methods will catch carp, they are by no means the most difficult fish to catch ( although they have a magic which probably no other fish have ) and I've caught carp ( although not always intentionaly!!) with all of them. Some will catch better than others in general, but there is no "RIGHT" way of doing it. repeat, there is no RIGHT way to catch carp, or any other fish apart from maybe dace. The key to catching the fish you want, be it a single specemin or a bag of doubles every single time is that when you walk out of the house to fish, you either have a strong enough plan in your head that you know will work, or you are adaptable enough to change. E.g. I know i'll be fishing this weeked, so this is my prep: 1) weather forecast. www.metcheck.com is by far the best. It shows you the wind directions and a three hourly breakdown. So I know that I need to be up at 5am tommorrow for a 6am start, to catch the sunshine, and need a swim that faces east so I can fish into the wind. Sunday it's raining, and the winds swinging everywhere and I don't own a brolly or a bivvy, so need a lake that I can rove around on, and which has trees around to have a smoke under if it gets really bad. 2) Venue Tommorrow I want to catch a few really nice fish. I have maybe ten venues I know really well. Two of those will meet my requirements for the weather. I want to be able to have fun and relax as well, so that discounts one of my venues which is 25 foot deep and massive, and so will be slow. It can be speeded up, with pre-baiting and raking, but I haven't done anything like this. Therefore I'm left with one lake to fish. 3) Tactics now I know where I'm going, and where I need to be when I get there, I know the lake well enough that I can narrow down the tactics to those specific tactics that are right for maybe a total of four swims. I can narrow them down even further because I know the time of day, and so predict things like light level and tempreture. Having read Walkers and Stones books, I know how the fish will be feeding in these conditions. It's the start of June, and I'm fishing in the morning. I would be crazy not to take a fly rod ( As we're in the middle of duffers fortnight, when the mayflys are hatching.) but I also know that it's cold tonight, so tomorrows hatch may be late, after I've left. However, I also know that I'm fishing in mud, and it's been warm for the last few weeks, so the fish are in the shallows. Carp in Shallows + mud = carp feeding on swan mussels naturally, so I'll be fishing those as well. I'll also take a bucket of particles, like above, as I know that caro in warm weather have the energy to root around looking for food. I can either float fish them or free-line big baits, and I'll keep my options open by taking some peacock quill, swan shot and flaot rubbers. If the carp are taking the bottom to pieces then I like to use the lift method. If I can't see mud swirls, I'll free-line for more confident takes, but this means I have to hold my rod all the time, which is slightly less relaxing. By working the above out before I leave the house, I'm 95% confident that I'll be in a place where the fish are, that I'll be able to present them with a bait that they want, and that I'll have the right kit to do it properly. What I wrote the fish time is a good way of fishing a commercial, especially in the evenings, and will certianly, in the conditions listed, work. But I knew they would before I left the house. if you go though the above steps, which are pretty general and work most of the time, then while you can't be TOTALLY sure that they will work, you can be sure your fishing the best method, in the best part of the best lake for that moment in time. Hope you get some monsters. Steve

There are three things that you have to do to catch any fish. Carp or trout, it's exactly the same. They are, in priority order: 1) Find some fish. As Grint says, if there are no fish around, you can't catch them 2) present them with a bait that they want to eat, or, will cause them to attack the bait ( carp, as they get bigger, or when they shoal, become quite predatory, like chub ) 3) Use a rig that will allow ctach the fish AND land it. I'm guessing your fishing a commercial? I went fishing with 'er indoors last weekend to a "heavy commercial" i.e one that is no totally rammed with 8 oz fish, but has a fair few decent fish in, from about 5 - 15lb. This was our method ( as ever she caught more fish than me ) Get a bucket. chuck into the bucket a small tin of corn, some ( not pounds of..) small pellets, some medium sized pellets, some hemp and tares if you can, yesterdays maggots and maybe a few catsers. Maybe also a tin of tuna flakes. That's your groundbait. Kit: rod: something practical. I use a short avon rod for pleasure fishing. reel: Again something practical, I use a 035 sized reel as I have short fingers, it holds more than enough line. Line: 5 or 6 pound Maxima rig: 1.0 gram pole float with an ollivette near the hook and a couple of droppers, or a loaded waggler float. If using a waggler, have less than 1cm of float showing. Rig is: Float, shot, hook. That's it. Extra's: Mat to sit on ( I don't use a chair, although missus does ) forceps, net. spare hooks shot, floats. What not to take: ANYTHING ELSE!!!! You don't need it for fishing close and having some fun, I swear. Most important: Time. try and arrive at the lake after 3pm on a normal summers day. on a hot day, don't even start until 4. Bait: Mussels ( Asda or farm foods ), worms, pellets, boilies, anything else. Walk around the lake. Find a spot with lillies or rushes near your feet or a few years away. take time to choose your position. Wear trainers, walk slowly. Look for trembling stalks, pads etc. look for "different" especially somewhere where there is some shade and shelter. We fished swims where we were dropping the floats in at the end of the rods. Put in a good hand full of your mixture, next to and also into the feature. ( so fishing next to lillys, I was baiting my swim but also feeding onto the pads themselves ). Then tackle up, keeping away from the edge. Plumb the swim ( IMPORTANT ) and fish a few inches over-depth. feed every five minutes. Start with pellets, worms, corn etc as bait. When you have feed for an hour or so, move onto mussel. If you fish mussels ALWAYS hold your rod, or you'll loose it. We fished from 4 - 8 on a water that is definatly not "Easy". The match the day before had been won with 22lb. We took 18 fish, all different, to a top weight of 22lb 3oz. We guessed the total at about 150lb. By the time we packed up, both swims were dark brown becuase the carp had turned the bottom up so much. Why? 1) We fished where the fish were 2) We used baits that they wanted and/or make them aggressive. Best bait was half a worm for the smaller ( less than 8-9 pound ) fish, and mussles for the bigger fish. 3) Fish attaract fish. As soon as a few carp are feeding, others will investigate. 4) balanced tackle. The line weight may seem low, but everything in the rig was balanced. The twenty pound fish was landed more safely on my setup than using heavy line and a 3lbTc rod, as I was fishing at my feet, so needed eveything to bend and flex. Light line lets everything move better bait-wise as well. 5) There was a method behind it: We were fishing particles, which carp love, and lots of different ones. The lake is used for matches, so using some maggots and casters was giving them what they were used to, where they would expect it ( think what happens when someone packs up to go home...) We fished lightly and simply, we fished in a way that the carp aren't used to, as most fish either the metod or in-line ledger rigs. Try that method. It cost me less than £10 pound for a good session, and it was fun. I also caught a lot of fish, becuase I thought about what was happening and what the fish wanted. Steve

I'm an outsider to the carp scene, but read a lot of the books and magazines that are produced. I think that there is a lot of over-complication, and a lack of, for a better word, under-complication, in some, not all, of the carp world. Simple things, like the pressured waters that are discussed. Why fish such a water? Fish a river, or a different, less battered lake. For myself as someone who is not in the scene very deeply, I would say even things such as in-line leads are advancement for advancments sake in "some" cases. In waters where rigs need to seem natural, why tie them down solid to the bottom. Using a normal bomb on a 10 inch paternoster not only would massivly increase bite sensitivity but also would make the terminal tackle, what ever it may be, act more naturally. To me, it seems that carp fishing advances massively in some directions while staying very static in others. Rigs seems to change constantly, and there is a huge amount of thinking that goes into them, and bait flavours change by the day, but rigs are almost all fixed or semi fixed ledger rigs, these days with short pieces of stiff linkage between the lead and the hook, and bait is almost totally small round boilies with pellets and particles as feed. What I get lost with is why the advancement happens all in specific area's and not others? I asked in another post about this. I've had lots of doubles, a good few twenties and a thirty in this year, all the time fishing simply but using, or at least trying to use, what I've learned from 50 years of knowledge in books and forums like these. I have never fished a fixed or semi-fixed rig. I use a hair rig very occasionally, but I still do well. Not great, but well. People like Taylor, Walker, Ingram etc didn't have the knowledge that we have, nor the tackle or the size of fish to catch, but if they did, would they have fished differently than they did?