When life gets in the way
When I was a bit younger (and keener) I would put most things off to get out in search of carp, this would include things that I really shouldn’t have neglected. And while that (usually) isn’t a crime I fear that life itself has taken me over. I’ve turned into a ‘normal bod’ fishing just a few snatched nights here and there and feeling guilty for enjoying my pleasure.
Being a thinker and an analyzer I would hope that I have learnt a few things along the way and I have generally found that I can fish a lot less now, but at the same time eliminate some of the blanks by making sure that I am there for the productive times. The autumn into early winter has always been the time of year where I have caught my better fish and I think that four of my top five biggest fish ever have come between October and December.
When I was ‘super keen’ (ha!) I would go fishing regardless of the likelihood of catching carp, I was just happy to be there, but I have found that when time is limited I tend to calculate much more. Take now for example, I waited until my beloved daughter returned to school (donning expensive new uniforms, shoes, bag, lunch box etc.) and low and behold I spotted on the moon phase phone app that a new moon coincided with the midweek freedom that would now be possible to pursue.
Targets and moonies
Now for all you non-moon believers, whether you hold any weight to the moon arguments or chose not to, the one thing that the new moon usually brings is weather. Generally low-pressure, wind and rain which I am sure we all agree is ‘carpy’.
The fish I would really like to catch this year is a Lancashire 40-pounder that I came close to catching once before a couple of years ago after I had a little bash, but it still remains unfinished business. I cannot justify the time or the money to travel south at the minute so ‘localism’ it is.
Now this fish is a tricky target, having only been out once in the last two years, it was last caught 15 yards from my spot with my Nash bait trickling out of its rear to a good friend of mine who wasn’t actually going to fish but I had encouraged him to ghilly for me as I was catching pretty well at a time when the lake was fairly quiet. (My how I smiled with tragic irony!)
Nevertheless this time I have a few tricks up my own sleeve as I think that with limited time on a very busy public lake I will need a little bit of luck also on my side if I’m to see this particular carp in my net.
Gaining an edge
One of my edges are the new Nashbait Soluballs, in case you’ve missed these, they are a type of large (18 and 24mm) ball pellet that can be put out in the same way as boilies in the purpose made Cobra stick or by spod or catapult.
The beauty of them is that they break down completely to powder but leave a decent little pile of food. In quantities they look amazing on the bottom – like a dense carpet of porridge filling the swim, giving off complex food signals designed to create an insatiable appetite which no carp however spooky or pressured can resist.
I am sure that they are very different to anything that the carp have seen in this lake previously and I have already noticed that there is a hell of a lot of bait being put in every day so I think that although appearing to be baiting the same as everyone else I am actually leaving far less ‘substance’ on the bottom while not losing any attraction.
Changing tactics
In light of a recent French trip earlier in the year I had scaled up my tackle to cope with the larger fish that we expected to catch and I had become used to looking at the larger hooks that I employed due to the larger size of the mouths of foreign carp.
I generally fish for 40lb plus carp in England, which also generally have large mouths and so it occurred to me that the current fixation with smaller hooks and concealment is just making life harder than it needs to be to catch our quarry.
There were many occasions as a kid when I used to coarse fish and in the same swim on consecutive days I couldn’t get a bite on, say, a size 16 or 18 hook but by scaling down to a 20 or 22 it would make all the difference, so I see the logic in using smaller hooks all the time for carp.
There are, however, many factors involved on the route to getting a carp bite on the low-stock lakes that I generally fish these days, much more in fact than just the hook size and there aren’t as many opportunities to vary your approach as when you are casting a float out every ten minutes.
I also remember the days of ‘confidence’ rigs in the late eighties, this would involve having hooklengths that doubled in length when picked up by a fish, usually involving two lengths of braid and split rings PVA’d to the swivel to double the length, or by using elastic combi rigs that did a similar job. Even then it was written that if you used confidence rigs all of the time the fish would eventually become used to them and then where would you go from there?
My thoughts are that you use the ‘edges’ at times when you are struggling and think you really should be catching; i.e. you can visibly see fish looking happy and showing in the vicinity and therefore you would expect to receive a bite and haven’t. This is the time I would apply the logical step of fining down of my tackle.
Think big
To my way of thinking there are some obvious advantages in using bigger hooks, for example they have to be far more effective at nicking the sides of fish with bigger mouths. To empahsise this imagine a small ring of maybe four inches in diameter, if you tried to throw a pea through it you would probably send it through the middle without touching the sides nine times out of ten.
If you then tried to do the same with a ping pong ball through the same sized ring, whilst it might go through most times I bet it would touch the sides four or five times out of your ten throws. A larger hook, rather than a small one, will surely have the same effect and give you extra chances on the suck and blow of a carp on a chow down? When a carp lifts its head during feeding after sucking in your rig and the hook link and tightens against your lead it goes without saying that a bigger gape of hook has to be more effective, doesn’t it?
For the French trip I had stepped up to size five Nash TT Twisters and size four Fang Xs, both very strong hooks and although large I soon became visually used to them, almost to the point where my previously used size ten and eights in the same patterns now looked too small.
In the mid nineties a few of my pals on the Colne Valley lakes that I fished at the time were using small hooks and I was using big size four Jack Hiltons or similar and our season tally used to be about the same in respect of captures.
Generally I think that we give too much credit to our prey, in essence I think carp simply react to danger through instinct influenced by the experiences, good or bad, when feeding on our baited traps.
If the trend is to use small hooks then the fish can learn to cope with the associated hazards by varying the sucking power or the resistance applied when feeding. They don’t have the mental capacity to ‘think things through’ and as a consequence, simply changing to something different is enough to trip them up.
Our hooks now, unlike when I was float fishing, are not suspended mid water but usually fished on the bottom and when viewed from above, must look pretty unobtrusive or they may even be hidden underneath a pop up. Some friends of mine years ago on Darenth had success using some very large 1/0 sea hooks with a small 12mm pop-up riding on the shank, how many anglers are fishing those tactics on your water? Not many I’m sure.
It’s decision made and at the moment I can only see advantages, especially when I think of the size of my target fish, also the last two bites I have had from bream while I have been penning this has also convinced me, a big hook certainly hasn’t deterred them and they were never getting off!
Keep thinking and may all of your carp be large.
