marcustackley

Some good posts here, seems like some anglers are breaking boundaries which I love to see. I get 2 weeks a year to fish sanctioned by the missus - god lover her! And choose to spend that time on the Ebro, St Lawrence, Grand river etc. We have two nippers and I earn good money working in a pressured job, I love carp fishing and I read about it daily, but I don't get to practise. I'm so sick of the uk scene I much prefer to spend my time, money and intelligence working on a pioneering trip, rather than fishing pressured waters. Absolutely agree it's each to his or her own, and me and the wife still get the odd day session if we can find a baby and dog sitter, but at 3 and 5, it's not easy! Lots of love going out to those pioneers amongst you, it ain't easy but god loves a trier, TDP is my hero, would love to have the time and balls to spend filming and fishing but also have a family to provide for, keep it up guys

There's two different topics touched on there, the behaviour of bait and the quality of the terminal tackle. It's possible to have carp feeding confidently in your baited spot without the hookbait being touched - i.e. your terminal tackle is constructed so that carp don't associate it with danger, but your hookbait is unnatural enough to ensure feeding fish won't touch it. Likewise you can have spooky fish taking a natural looking hookbait, so you make a valid point there Salok On a slightly different tack, carp in one of my local gravel pits regularly pick stones up and mouth them before ejecting them, so I thought i'd balance my hookbaits to ensure there's little suction required to pick up my bait. I combined this with short stiff links and heavy leads to ensure hook penetration on 'mouthing' and whilst I had some success it couldn't be described as hectic. I then started mixing Richworth's pop-up mix in to my base mix to create wafters as I thought the size of the snowman set up I'd been using was too big and clumsy for the carp being fished for, but this didn't turn them on either. Recently I've started making the hookbaits heavy, these require a lot of suction to move - bingo! - the twitches have turned in to runs when combined with a tight hair pattern. Bit off topic I know but it highlights it doesn't necessarily all come down to the lead size and fixing

I am 100% sure that it's the feel of the end tackle that causes the carp to spook, and it has little to do with sight. The sensitivity of the carps' barbules and lips far outweigh it's eyesight and it's the unnatural feeling of end game components that cause the carp to spook. Like Salok I almost exclusively use leadcore instead of tubing after watching Underwater and doing the hand and foot test myself. I almost exclusively fish silty waters which means the leadcore sinks slightly in to the soft detritus and over time takes on the natural smell of the lake bed rather than the rubbery artificial smell of the tubing.

I think we often try and make simple things complicated because it's been drummed in to us that these things work on big or 'hard' waters. I fished a very low stocked 53 acre water (10 pegs) last weekend and a Pike fisherman who was stalking around pulled a very neatly crafted Withy Pool rig from the Jaws of an 8lb Pike. The carp in there aren't shy biting or 'wise' they are just very few and far between (60 in total) sometimes I think we tie these rigs to impress the carp in hope that they find it so aesthetically pleasing they take the bait just to meet the angler