Is it too hot for lake fishing or your river is too low? Nick Thomas takes us through carp on the fly
If you’ve never fly fished for carp now, in the middle of summer, is a great time to have a go. Catching carp on a fly rod is increasing in popularity every year; just search ‘carp fly fishing’ on YouTube to see how much fun it can be. I spend a lot of time on some of the wilder lakes I fish using flies which imitate natural food like beetles, dragonflies and sedges (see ESF issues 20, 27, 34 and 44 for some fly patterns). This fishing can be every bit as challenging as pursuing fussy trout with a dry fly.
Sometimes however you just want to have fun and catch a few (or many) big fish. To scratch that itch a few hours on a well-stocked day ticket or club lake is just the job. More and more coarse fisheries are opening up to fly anglers; see Dom Garnett’s excellent resource at flyforcoarse.com for a list of UK venues or check out your local angling club’s lakes. While you can catch carp on these waters using natural imitations, if you want to match the hatch in terms of what the fish are used to eating, some form of floating bait imitation is the way to go. So if you want to start catching a few carp on a fly rod here a few pointers based on a good few years’ experience.
Chances are you already have most of the tackle you’ll need. A 7wt rod is ideal, a 5wt or 6wt will do, provided it’s fairly beefy. I wouldn’t go any lighter than that unless you’re sure you will be only catching fish of a couple of pounds. I do not recommend connecting to a double figure fish on a 3wt. You will need a floating line on a reel with a good smooth drag; don’t even think of playing a decent sized carp by hand-lining or palming the reel during a run. Check your backing before you go – when did you last see yours? I can only think of a few times when I’ve had the backing off the reel with a trout on the other end, including some very big fish. I know that on some of the carp lakes I fish where the water is clear and shallow I’ll have many yards of backing outside of the rod tip several times a day. Check your backing knot, keep your fingers out of the way and let the reel drag do its work; backing burns.
Apart from a suitable rod and reel and a decent sized landing net with a long handle, you’ll need an unhooking mat. Most fisheries or club waters will rightly insist on you having one and you can get one at your local tackle shop or online for less than a tenner.
Now we come to the bit that the fly fishing purists tend to splutter at – feeding surface bait. Admittedly it’s an alien concept in standard fly fishing scenarios, but think of it as stimulating fish to rise and then presenting the correct imitation dry fly. If you are lucky enough to be fishing a chalk stream during mayfly season nature will do the first bit for you and you would be fishing a mayfly and not a sedge imitation. On the right day with the right conditions you can catch carp by just sight-fishing to cruising fish, but if you want a simple fun day out you’ll need some surface attraction to get the fish up and feeding in front of you.
So get yourself down to your local supermarket and buy some dog mixer biscuits. From experience I’d recommend that you get two different own-brands and mix them up, this gives a blend of size and shapes making it a bit harder for the carp to distinguish your imitation from the real ones. Mixers are cheap, the Tesco ones are £2 for 4kg, which will easily last you for 4-5 sessions. You can throw the mixers in by hand but I’d recommend getting a catapult; the Guru yellow one is a good buy at around £6. A catapult will get the biscuits out much further than trying to chuck them and is much more accurate in refeeding the same spot.
Once you are set up with tackle and bait you need something to tie on the end of your line that looks and behaves like a dog biscuit. Over the years I’ve tried many different materials in pursuit of the ultimate imitation, cork, foam rubber, furry foam, egg yarn and others, but I’ve always come back to deer hair. There are many commercially tied deer hair biscuit imitations out there, but many are tied on hooks of dubious quality that will not take the strain of a big carp, and generally they are all too large. Carp are not inherently designed to feed on the surface and when slurping in food off the top they don’t always get it right. If you use a fly which is too large and difficult for them to inhale you stand a good chance of them being spooked by the hook or the tippet before you can strike. Carp are far more adept at spitting out a fly than trout and a poorly designed fly will only hook a small percentage of rises.
If you don’t roll your own then the Fulling Mill biscuit imitations are probably the ones to buy. They are tied on good strong Tiemco 2499 hooks and are barbless. There’s no reason on earth to use barbed hooks for carp flies; it’s not like hooks falling out due to a slack line is likely to be a problem to you. If you do use the Fulling Mill flies I’d advise that you trim them down a bit, particularly on top, with a sharp pair of scissors.
If you do tie your own then the DBDB is the one to make. It’s the ultimate imitation, the DBs of dog biscuits in fact. The DBDB is tied on a very tough QM1 hook which took me a long time of testing different hooks to settle on. The hook size and shape is the key. A size 10 has the strength required in a small hook to land large carp and just the right space on the shank to tie the optimum sized imitation for hooking, with the bare minimum of hook showing to spook the carp. The wide gape gives excellent hooking and the aggressive curve of the shank keeps the hook in place during a long fight. It’s very, very rare for one of these to come out. My success rate with this pattern is very much higher than I used to have with bigger conventional patterns tied on larger carp hooks. The foam post provides just enough buoyancy so the fly sits flat in the water like the real biscuits and the white dot on top, which the carp can’t see, lets you distinguish it from the real ones.
Hook Guru QM1 size 10
Thread Veevus 10/0, white
Body Deer hair, natural
Post Foam cylinder, white 1/8 inch
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Run the thread on behind the eye and take down to the bend in touching turns. Smear the thread wraps with superglue and run the thread back up and down the shank in open turns. QM1 hooks are Teflon coated and this helps lock everything in place.
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Cut a bunch of deer hair about the thickness of a pencil, hold by the tips and catch in at the bend with a couple of loose thread warps. While holding the hair tips pull the thread tight to splay the butt ends and take further tight wraps forward through the ends.
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Fold the butts backwards and make some tight thread wraps onto the hook shank.
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Cut a foam cylinder along its length and tie in one half at its midpoint in front of the deer hair.
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Fold back the ends of the foam and tie in a second clump of deer hair in front using the same technique as the first bunch. Bring the thread forward to the eye, hold back the hair, whip finish and seal with superglue.
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Separate the two halves of the foam cylinder from the deer hair, coat one cut surface with superglue and press the two halves together.
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Trim the deer hair and foam to form a cube about 8mm on each side. Now trim the top flat so that the height of the fly is less than the width and length; a top heavy fly will tip over and not fish effectively.
When you are suitably equipped and have chosen a lake to fish, keep an eye on the weather forecast. An ideal day is one with a clear blue sky and no wind, which is pretty rare, so you may have to settle for a few clouds and a light breeze. When you get to the lake, or ideally beforehand on Google Earth, try and pick a spot that gives you room for a back cast. Carp lakes are not generally landscaped for long casts like trout lakes, but don’t worry, you won’t need to cast a huge distance; in any case if your fly is too far away you may not be able to see the takes properly. With correct feeding you’ll be able to get the fish in pretty close so a short flick or a roll cast will get the fly among them. If you can, fish with the sun to one side or at your back; this makes it much easier to see cruising fish through your Polaroids. Fishing into sheltered calm water also makes things less stressful; a ripple on the water makes spotting your fly and fish moving towards it difficult to see and you can’t anticipate takes so well. If there is a breeze try an avoid areas where it is coming from the side. Any surface tow, even on calm water, will drag your line and move the fly; carp are just as fussy as trout and will not take a dragged dry fly. If you have to fish with a side wind mend your line to minimise drag if you can.
To fish a DBDB effectively use a furled leader with about four feet of 8-10lb supple fluorocarbon tippet. Stiff tippet will spook carp if they feel any sort of resistance pushing back on the fly as they try to take it. Tie on the fly, degrease the last foot or so of the tippet with fuller’s earth mud and the treat the rest of the fluorocarbon and the furled leader with floatant. You want all the leader except the last bit by the fly floating; a subsurface leader risks foul hooking fish which examine your fly, spook and then swirl away without taking. Do not put any floatant on the fly; quite the opposite is required. Before you cast out drop the fly in the water and squeeze it between your fingers to thoroughly wet it and ensure it sits low in the water just like the free biscuits. If you take a break from fishing keep the fly wet in some lake water on your unhooking mat.
Once you’ve found a good spot and tackled up its time to get some feed out on the surface. Little and often is the key, you are not aiming to carpet the lake surface in biscuits, just enough to attract the fish and keep them in front of you. Fire out a few catapult pouches of biscuits and wait a few minutes. If nothing happens continue putting out two or three biscuits every minute until the carp turn up attracted by the sound and vibrations of the mixers plopping into the water. If the carp are particularly active and the water looks like a Jacuzzi, wait before casting; with all the surface disturbance you won’t be able to see a carp take your fly and you risk a fish swimming into the leader and foul hooking itself. Once you’ve attracted the carp into your fishing zone the ideal situation is to always have just a few less biscuits on the surface than there are carp looking for them. Once the carp start to compete for the mixers they will spend less time critically examining your fly. The two carp in the image below were both after the same biscuit with the one underneath coming up from below and snaffling it under the nose of the other.
Once you’ve got a few carp swimming around in front of you, stick a couple of handfuls of dog biscuits in your trouser pocket and shove the catapult handle in there as well. Now cast your imitation biscuit among the fish, tuck the rod butt between your legs and fire out a few more biscuits around your fly. Never, ever, put your rod down on the ground with a fly out on the water; sooner or later you will lose your rod. Now put the catapult away, grab your rod and get ready. The reason for doing things this way is simple. On heavily fished day ticket and club waters the carp are not stupid; they know that things plopping onto the surface are free food which will shortly be followed by a pellet waggler or a float controller splashing in with not so free food with a hook in it. So if you just chuck out a load of biscuits and then sort out your line and cast there’s a good chance all the fish will have buggered off before your fly arrives.
You have a distinct advantage over the bait anglers in being able to stealthily deliver your imitation without disturbing the fish in the least. Carp are not at all bothered by fly lines; my current line is bright orange and occasionally they’ll try and eat the end loop. Get into a routine of feeding a few biscuits, casting your fly out and then feeding a few more offerings into the same area. The ideal situation is to have a spot in front of you with half a dozen or so biscuits sitting in a group about a yard across with several fish circling round looking to mop them up. If you’ve got the patience – and it is difficult, just leave your fly static and wait for one of the carp to find it. If one takes it cleanly without spooking and swirling away, lift the rod to set the hook and hang on. If you miss the take or the fish backs off, retrieve your fly a few feet to get it clear of the feeding fish, lift off and drop the fly back in the feeding zone. You’ll get a lot of your takes at this point; the fish are actively looking for food and the plop of a newly arrived offering close to a fish will often provoke an instant response.
If you see a new fish moving towards the baited area attracted by the sound of the other fish slurping down your biscuits, lift off the fly and drop it about a foot in front of it. If it ignores the fly lift off and repeat. This can be the most exciting part of fishing for carp with a fly. Once you have hooked and landed a few fish and have honed your reactions to hook a decent proportion of the takes you can start sight-fishing. Keep up the feeding pattern of little and often and start feeding two separate small areas in front of you. This will attract more fish from further away which you can target as they cruise in towards the baited areas. Now you can be selective and target the larger fish. If you see a smaller carp going to intercept your fly just pull it away, you won’t spook it or the other fish. When you see the one you want try and anticipate its speed and direction and drop your fly in front.
Finally don’t ignore the margins under your feet. As you work your catapult some biscuits invariably fall out of the pouch or ricochet off the handles and fall short of your target area and carp cruising the margins will intercept these right under your rod. If you are fishing on a platform sit on the end or fold up your unhooking mat and kneel on the bank. Lowering your silhouette makes you less visible to the carp and you’ll be surprised just how close they will come. Reel in almost all of your fly line leaving just a foot or so beyond the rod tip; you definitely don’t want the leader to line connection jamming in the tip ring as a double figure carp powers away from you.
Chuck in a few biscuits a yard out from the bank on either side of you, hold the rod up at a steep angle and simply lower your fly onto the water. If you see a fish approaching just lift and swing the rod to drop the fly on the surface right on its nose. Carp anglers call this dobbing; fly anglers call it dapping. With no line on the water to spook the fish takes tend to be confident; all you need to do is trap the line against the rod handle as the fish submerges with your fly. Don’t think you’ll just be catching small foolish fish this way; it tends to be the larger warier fish that stick close to the cover of reeds and bushes along the bank.
Nick Thomas lives in South Wales. He started fly fishing on Scottish hill lochs many years ago and continues to design, tie and fish flies for trout, carp, bass and anything else that’s going.