THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR BIG-FISH ACTION
GAZ FAREHAM explains how spending more time finding perfect ‘spots’, and less time messing about with fancy rigs and complicated tactics is the best recipe for success
I’ve spent a lot of my angling life fishing short sessions and overnighters, often getting my rods sorted in the fading light, or even well after dark.
Being able to pinpoint small spots, and get sharp, balanced rigs out there in a short timeframe is something that will pay dividends on any water in the country.
Carp fishing can be complex enough without adding any unnecessary extra layers of complication through fancy rigs, bait mixes and tactics – much of that is simply designed to sell you more kit, tackle and bait that you don’t need.
I do regular angling tuitions these days, and the first thing I try to do for the lads on these is to strip everything back to the basics. Having had the privilege of fishing over recent years with some of the very best anglers both in the UK and abroad, I can tell you that the best of the best just do the simple things, but they do them really well.
If you can find carp consistently, and put a good bait with a sharp hook on a good spot consistently, you will catch carp. It really is as simple as that.
I do a lot of my tuitions on Reading and District AA’s fantastic Junction 12 Lake, so in a bid to show how I go about tackling busy waters while at the same time trying to keep it simple, I’m going to break down my approach into a few simple sections. These are exactly the same set of equations I would apply anywhere else as well.
Location is absolutely everything!
Being able to locate your quarry underpins everything in carp fishing, and those anglers who work harder to acquire solid watercraft skills will be the most consistent, not the ones with the shiniest rods or the biggest buckets of bait.
Location is dictated by, among other things: the weather, the changing seasons, angling pressure, weed growth, and the features or topography contained within a given lake. The more time you spend looking and watching the water, the more you will learn.
On pressured waters the behaviour of the carp can be heavily dictated by the other anglers, and Junction 12 usually sees a big group of anglers fishing through the weekend, with most areas taken.
When I arrive for a tuition session there’s likely to have been a few buckets of bait put out there over the weekend and the carp will be on edge because of the number of lines having been present. This is the same at countless busy waters, so it is something that you should always be aware of, before you start piling in the bait.
The Junction 12 fish aren’t usually big on showing, and if they do it is usually on the end of a fresh new wind. Regardless, I always spend a few hours walking the lake, checking all the margin spots, and looking for any signs to try to ascertain where the bulk of the stock is.
I’ll look at what the weather has done for the last few days, and what it is due to do during the trip. How strong is the wind, and is it a fresh wind? All these things go into the decision-making pot.
On busy waters, very often you’ll find fish away from wherever the main bulk of the pressure is, or has been, yet lots of anglers simply don’t look hard enough.
Sometimes it can be 11pm by the time I’ve done a few circuits, heard a few shows and decided where to plot up, even after a week at work. Unless I know for certain I’m on fish, I’m never settled. One lap of the lake, seeing nothing, and then dropping into a comfortable swim near the car park just won’t do.
So, let’s assume you’ve managed to find them. The next thing is to determine what is the best spot to try and catch them from.
Getting the drop
This seems to be the main thing people struggle with, especially on weedy waters. However, in my view weedy waters are actually easier to rationalise than open water ones. If you have a swim that is 80 per cent weed, then your options become more straightforward because all you have to do is find a couple of clean, hard spots and the decision is made for you.
I always try to impress on anglers that the skill of feeling the lead down and getting a proper ‘drop’ is the most fundamental carp angling skill they can learn, and the one that will have the biggest impact on their results. The best rig or bait in the world will be rendered useless if it is buried in weed, or sat like a mangled ball on the spot.
Learning how to consistently hit a clip cleanly, with just the right force, and to maintain contact with the lead all the way through the water column until you feel it touch down, is the aim of the game. It tells you how deep the spot is, if you clipped any weed on the way down, and how firm the substrate of the spot is.
If it takes 10 or 20 casts, so be it. It has
to be right.
It’s the same with finding the spots themselves. I find a lot of anglers get disheartened too quickly and settle for something that just feels ‘okay’. They’re not the best spots, and investing time in finding those rock-hard, ‘glassy’ clean spots will always produce the goods.
Limited presentations
I always keep my rigs simple and have just a few absolutely tried, tested and massively trusted set-ups that I use in 99.9 per cent of situations.
Rig choice is dictated to by the spot being fished, the hookbait being used, and the loosefeed it is getting presented over – not what the last YouTube edit you watched told you is the ‘next big thing’!
Carp feed differently over different baits. For fishing over a spread of boilies where the fish are dropping and picking up individual food items, then popups, balanced bottom baits and longer hooklinks are my choice to ensure good hookholds.
If I’m fishing tight spots over pellets, seeds, crumb and ‘bits’ where the carp are scouring tight to the lakebed, then I’ll opt for something shorter and stiffer with a balanced hookbait on the bottom. Those are my two primary decisions – ‘what’s the spot?’ and ‘what I am fishing over?’
The spots on Junction 12 can be relatively small, but because the carp respond so well to a primarily boiliebased approach I always keep things simple and fish my rigs accordingly.
Owing to the weed growth, the quality of hookhold is paramount, but with the rig I have used for over 10 years now I rarely get hook-pulls. In fact, it produces the most consistent hookholds of any rig I have ever used!
The rig is based on a short shanked, curved point hook, and a simple set-up incorporating a semi-stiff coated link, a
balanced bottom bait and a long shrink tube kicker. The Junction 12 carp have soft mouths, and the longer kicker and curved points stay in especially well.
I’m very particular about how neat my rigs are, and the link is always dead straight before it goes out, and the point immaculately sharp – those two simple things let a lot of lads down. The straightness of the link not only helps the mechanics function properly by laying the rig out, but it will also tell you how well it has been sat, because when you wind it in, it should still be ruler straight!
Trusted ingredients
I’ve always put my faith in a small range of absolutely trusted bait ingredients. From April through until November, Krill boilies are my first choice. I’ve used a boilie-centric approach on Junction 12 for the vast majority of my fishing and it has proved incredibly successful. Occasionally I have just used pure boilies when fishing at catapult range and spots have been close enough to pinpoint, but more often than not I
“ON THE PEAK OF A NEW MOON, AT JUST PAST MIDNIGHT, MY BALANCED BOTTOM BAIT TRUNDLED OFF”
have opted for a Spombed area, using a simple mix incorporating 12mm and 16mm Krill and a few other bits.
My basic summer and autumn mix involves lightly glazing the baits with a heavy liquid food like Liquid Krill or LO30. With the baits very lightly glazed I add a healthy dose of GLM Powder, a big pinch of sea salt, and some Krill Powder. This will form a nice thick ‘crust’ on the baits and given a few minutes to dry it locks itself on and doesn’t just wash off on the way down.
To that I add a few handfuls of the nice oily Ellipse pellets, a pinch of corn and sometimes a can of tuna in oil when water temperatures are at their peak.
Proof of the pudding
A couple of seasons ago my mate Dan Whitford caught the big mirror from Junction 12 at around 43lb. He got some mega shots of it – a thickset, dark fish with a couple of lovely big scales on her shoulders. I really fancied catching her, but because of my tuitions and the fact that I often have to put my own angling second, it was more in hope than expectation.
However, one thing I’d noticed from having spent many hours up trees watching the resident carp was that I was yet to see her with any of
the other stock. I had started to wonder if she behaved differently, and fed on different spots.
In the end, the spot I caught her from was a small, glassy-smooth silty spot tucked away almost over the top of a set of reeds well to the left of one of the swims. I was almost certain it was a naturally created spot and not one that gets fished, so it hadn’t been created and kept clean by bait.
On the peak of a new moon, at just past midnight, my balanced Krill bottom bait trundled off, and after a heavy, wallowing fight I slipped the net under what was clearly a massive mirror. As 99 per cent of the bites on Junction come from first light through until around 4pm, this was the only night bite I have had out of maybe 60-plus now. Being well outside the normal feeding time and coming from a natural spot, maybe it was no surprise that it was she that sprung the trap, and my hunch seemed to have played itself out.
She went 49lb 4oz, looked beautiful on the mat and, for me, sealed what had been a lovely, if slightly unusual campaign to target a fish.
Catching big carp isn’t as imposing a challenge as many think it can be, provided you keep things simple and find the fish first. After that, a good bait and a sharp hook are the only other things you need. Good luck this autumn!