pick ‘n’ mix for the big girls
With peak floater fishing season now well underway, MAT WOODS reveals the tricks he uses to single out the bigger fish from a shoal of surface slurpers!
SURFACE fishing can be both the easiest and the hardest of summer carp fishing tactics. It’s a bit like going out on the pull. You know that, on the face
of it, there’s a really good chance on a night out – loads of ladies having a good time, pouring drinks down their necks – and yet you do everything in your power to fail. That, to me, is surface fishing down to a T.
GETTING THEM GOING
On the majority of occasions you can encourage a carp to feed on the surface quite freely.
Lump of bread, pouchful of floaters – you know the drill. Most of the time they’re up pretty quick, slurping down a big gobful of oxygen along with your free offerings. The more they eat, the more confident they get, and before long there’s a flotilla of submarines with lips gorging on the floating banquet.
You all know what happens next. You fumble around putting a hookbait on, try to figure out which controller float to use and then faff around trying to cast the long hooklength out without making too much disturbance.
If you’re lucky – or good – your bait will whizz past the carp and land quietly, enabling you to wiggle it back into position with stealth and precision. If you’re like me, you’ll land it on the biggest carp’s head and spend the next hour trying to build their confidence again!
Trust regained, more shoulders appear and the ensuing competition for food gives you a little more leeway with your dodgy casting skills. What happens next is that all the free floaters vanish and your hookbait is left alone, like the kid who didn’t get picked for the football team – or the bloke who went home with a kebab instead of a new girlfriend.
KEEP FEEDING
The key, I’ve found, is to not let that happen. What I mean by that is, don’t ever let the surface become devoid of free bait.
I used to think as the freebies disappeared that eventually my hookbait would be the only one left, and they’d have to take it if they were still hungry. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that this very rarely results in a carp on the end of the line.
It may seem counter-intuitive to feed more and reduce the odds of your hookbait being taken, but I have found the opposite is true.
A good indicator of when a bite is imminent is when the carp are taking more than one bait at a time – happy to keep their eyes in the surface layer and their mouths out of the water.
This behaviour seems infectious among the carp. Once one drops its guard, the others follow suit, giving you time – on occasion – to single out the fish you want to catch.
I had first-hand experience of this on a recent visit to Baden Hall Fisheries’ day-ticket Bridge Pool in Staffordshire.
The lake is reasonably weedy, crystal-clear, and the majority of the carp are between 15lb and 25lb. There are some much bigger ones swimming around and often, when a pod of fish start feeding, at least one of the fish is an absolute whacker, or an absolute beauty! I managed to single out some gorgeous fish, often at the expense of the bigger ones.
‘MOUTHING’ METHODS
So how does that happen? Well, of course, there’s still a massive element of luck involved, but you can stack the odds in your favour simply by watching how the individual fish feed. That sounds easy, but let me explain.
When the carp start feeding, watch the way they actually take the baits. Each of them will do it slightly differently. Some are clumsy slurpers, some make a
lot of noise, some move a lot of water and some are like little stealth munchers, where you barely know its happened.
Others turn to the same direction every time they take a bait – this is important – and, of course, you get the odd blind one that misses the target every single time.
I like the ones that show a bit of shoulder when they come up. For me, this is an indicator of a better-sized fish, so I’ll look harder to check for the size of its mouth and gills.
Sometimes you can see them easily enough to know exactly what’s what, but on the venues I fish they don’t usually take with that much confidence in flat calm conditions. Get a bit of a ripple on out in the lake and it’s a whole different ball game.
A RESULT, OF SORTS…
So, back to the Bridge Pool for a moment. After taking a good four hours or so watching them and finally getting them going a bit on Oily Floaters, I could see I had a couple of scamps feeding really hard.
I baited more heavily and brought the scamps closer to where the baits were landing. I waited for some better fish to join in, and they did – some 20 yards behind the scamps.
Although I couldn’t quite make out how many fish were out there, because it was a good 50 yards out into the lake, I could make out several big brown sets of shoulders. Before long, I’d sussed the distance to cast the controller to get the perfect drift, with my hookbait moving along the surface at the same speed as the free offerings.
The Code Red Oil covering the surface helped me see what was what a little better and, before long, my bait was right among the two better carp that were feeding.
It was inevitable that the line would sail away and I was electrified by the take – a really positive bite where the bait vanished, followed swiftly by the controller float. Fish on!
Steady pressure kept the fish moving through the weedbeds, and before long there was a nice chunky mirror in the folds.
Building their confidence had paid off with a much bigger fish. Unfortunately for me, a bit like some of my nights out on the pull, it was a bit of a minger!