I started playing around with different ways of camouflaging my end tackle to suit the lake bed I’m fishing.I’ve started fishing a large 70 acre gravel pit in the south west which holds a small amount of large carp that have proved themselves to be hard to catch, so I’ve been taking my end tackle to the next stage to see if I can blend it all in to match the lake bed. After playing around with making my own leads and camouflaging them I started to play with a lead clip, then the rubber and the rig tubing. All you need is a blow torch and some powdered coating which will match your lake bed.
Philip Parker wrote:
I will be tackling a venue that contains a good head of large grasscarp. The lake itself is quite shallow 3′-4′ and around nine acres in size. Can anyone offer some advice on trying to catch them. Of all the fish I’ve caught this one has eluded me. Surface baits are not an option at this venue. Any advice would be well received and appreciated.
Gareth Watkins replies:
Hi Philip, Grasscarp are lovely looking fish and a strange species as they are not easy to target. They will get caught on boilies, but this is more often than not in a water that has little or no weed. In my experience on heavily weeded waters they very rarely get caught at all.
Being basically plant eaters the best way to go about attracting them to your swim is with a plant based bait. I have found maize and sweet corn to be very good in this respect. If you put down a large bed of these particles you have a fair chance you’ll get the fish move on to it. (more…)
Carpfishing has certainly been developing at an amazing rate over recent years. Just the other day I was sat having a chat with a good mate of mine and we got on to the topic of bait.
Now this conversation went down the route of how much bait you would use in certain circumstances, which has got my brain really working.
In my early days this bag would have lasted me weeks
Going back to the late eighties and very early nineties I would knock up a four egg mix and expect it to last me a couple of weekendsessions at the very least. Well I reckon that a four egg mix equates to about a pound and a half of 14mm baits, which would be a couple of hundred at the most. Generally that would be it, no pellet, hemp, corn or anything else. On arrival I would generally put in a couple of pouch fulls and if I caught I would add another pouch of boilies and so on. I remember putting in half a bag one day and worrying about ruining my chances. It’s crazy to think that way now but I was naive at the time and having come from a coarse background of fishing a few maggots and the odd grain of corn, 14mm boilies seemed so big.
Between our group we would commonly use the term I have filled in when in reality we weren’t even scratching the surface of what they could devour.
Over the years I have witnessed some occasions where I am certain you cannot over feed them. On one occasion I watched two Carp that probably weren’t even doubles munch down 2 pints of maggots in no more than a few minutes. That same day on a commercial fishery I had probably 300 Carp climbing over each other to get at my floaters, they were in a complete frenzied state. (more…)
I relearned and old lesson last weekend, you may think you have the lake sorted out but no one tells the carp the rules.When I joined Shaun on our syndicatewater Grenville Lake he had already fished for 24 hours.He was fishing a swim in a bay that he knows well and has fished successfully over the last year. I chose a swim at the other side of the point on his right.Conditions for us both looked good.Within an hour I was getting liners over the Surf n’Turf and after three hours I had a run that I did not connect with.I sat confidently for another 24 hours; while the new wind that should have pushed the fish towards swung slowly around 360 degrees and the temperature cooled considerably.Was I worried was I hell? The fish in this lake always fish off the back of a cold wind.Don’t they?The wind picked up and I sat it out. (more…)
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