By roy van goor

All anglers are waiting for the first sunny days, when the temperatures are going upwards and the lake shows more and more fish activity. The warmth of the sun is responsible for more carp movement and often you can catch them fairly easily on these mild days. A few tips that can be effective considering the early time of the season;

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1) Fish often don’t respond to heavy baiting: Under these circumstances, try to fish bags and single hookbaits. Bait that has gone in, can’t be taking out. So be careful with free offerings.

2) Always try to get your rods on the bank where the first sunlight falls on: This side of the lake will warm up faster and on a lot of occasions the majority of the fish will be hanging around in that part of the lake.

3) Don’t ignore the margins: Most of my early season captures are hooked just a few feet of the bank, right in my own margin..


4) Bait up with small quantity of bait: For example Maximum Action pellets and fish for 1 fish at a time. I prefer to use smaller hookbaits, 10mms..and fish them snowman style. Questbaits now sell 10mms and even provide pop-ups in the same diameter. Even when the temperature’s are looking good, the water is still cold, so the fish are not really digesting the baits and often they are not really on the search for food.

5) Another good tactic is using bright pop-ups: Place them just a few feet of the bank. The water is in most cases very clear early season and the visual aspect can provide you the big advantage. Keep away from the bank, always try to get as far away from the rods as possible. The clearness of the water makes it easy for carp to see shadows of approaching people and detect possible danger.

6) Use Slack Lines: Another thing that’s very important, maybe the biggest key to success, are in my view is slack lines. Its unbelievable how easy fish can detect them. Often I have been watching fish approaching anglers territory and you could see them spooking of before they even came close to the baited areas.

A lot of theses tips are proven to bring more fish on the bank for me.  Try to take advantage of them and make the perfect start of the new season.

roy van goor

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