Quest Baits Blog

By Roy van Goor

A few hints and tips for tackling summer carp;

When fishing the warmer periods in the summer its gets harder to catch carp on most venues.
Natural food sources, less oxygen, lots of weed, competition of other species are a few factors that are responsible for less action and more batteries life.

My personal approach for catching fish in the summer is active fishing. Not just sitting behind the rods and waiting for things to happen, or in a lot of cases don’t happen. Walking around on the hottest moment of the day and look for the fish.

Often you can see them hanging around in the upper layers above weedbeds or hanging around underneath bushes. When you found some fish in a particular area the next thing to do is check out the bottom profile around that spot.

The important question is ….is it fishable?

A lot of weedbeds normally hold fish for instance.. and are in a lot of cases above gravel patches or gravel area’s…perfect for presentation.

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I was fishing a local syndicate water recently when after about an hour a strong south westerly wind got up.  Now this water is no more that 4 feet deep and a strong wind even at this time of year generally kills the fishing stone dead.

I was only on one of my short afternoon sessions so decided to carry on, anyway 6 hours later I hadn’t had so much as a sniff or even seen a sign of a fish so I packed up knowing I should have gone somewhere else.

This session got me thinking about another shallow lake that I no longer fish. This lake again was no more than 4 feet deep but it had one very discernable difference to the syndicate lake mentioned above, in that around 75 % of the lake was covered in lily pads.  The vast majority of the time the carp would lie up amongst the dense lily beds and you were doing well if you averaged 1 run a day.

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Hi all – I’m delighted to report my PB UK common at 37-8. I’ve been after this fish for a couple of years and as you can see from the photos it’s a truly stunning fish.

The estate lake I’m fishing is very weedy and it can be difficult to find areas to put a bait on. I’m always looking out for areas in the weed that are clearer than others, but with the weed already thick in front of me finding what I was looking for took some time. I found a couple of areas I was reaonably happy with but after 24 hours I’d not had a bite and not seen any signs of fish showing anywhere. continue reading…

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 syndicate water 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. continue reading…

By Carl Bullock

After reading Roy’s recent article on the fishingmagic site, (and a very good read it was too) my mind starting ticking over about observation. So I thought I would share my own views on the subject.

It goes without saying that if you spent ten minutes in a tree watching an area you might not see any signs at all. But if you were to stay in the same tree for two hours you would most likely see a lot more. It’s all fine and well finding a group of fish in one part of the lake but is there any point in fishing that area if they are not feeding there? If you spend more time watching them you may see them disappear of to a certain spot to have a little grub around. They may even move out of sight, if so where do they go? Why do they go there? In this case I often follow them in the direction they disappeared and observe that area for signs of what they are up to. I also find it a good idea to observe groups of other species. I have often witnessed groups of tench and bream feeding fairly heavily on some spots and after some time witnessed groups of carp bully them out of the area.

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By Ron Key

Only been here a couple of hours

In the last year rather than stick to one main syndicate water I have fished lots of waters both in the UK and France.  Most of these waters were completely new to me, many I had not even seen before I started fishing.

Of course I could write about how I used watercraft, searching for gravel spots, weed beds, bars, drop offs, gulleys, bottlenecks and all the usual elements that go into choosing our swim and the places we fish in them.

I’m going to take that as read though and concentrate on feeding.

When I approach a new water; unless I know for certain the fish are feeding heavily, and fish are getting caught, it’s unlikely that I will start by creating large beds of particles or boilies from the start.

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