The best things about carp are also the worst things about them. In many parts of the world, carp are plentiful, resilient and even invasive. A day of carp fishing often comes with countless opportunities and shots at redemption, but what else can carp teach us about fly fishing?

How to Sight Fish

I believe blind casting for carp completely misses the good side of these fish (yes there is one). There should be no need to bait them with bread, or even to use flies that look like dough. I suppose in an ultra-urban environment it’s okay, but in the wild it’s simply unnecessary. Colour, shape, and movement are the key elements to spotting fish. We need to be attuned to these three things at all times. For example, let’s say you spot some colour, look closely to see its shape or if it moves. In slightly murky water, colour can be a stick, a rock on the bottom, or a contour in the substrate. Carp can also lie stationary, making them a great opportunity to fine-tune your spotting skills. For example, the subtle colour change of a tail is often a give-away for those with well-adjusted eyes.

Movement can be as subtle as the flick of a tail underwater, the yellow flash of lips, or an anomalous ripple. Even a puff of mud from a feeding fish presents both colour and movement. These principles apply to all sight fishing, on any water. Additional elements are shadow and flash, but they aren’t as significant on carp water.

Stalking Fish

Fisheries with little pressure are often home to unsuspicious carp. There’s a river west of where I live with big sandy bends and gravel bars. Early in the season, when they’re just beginning to get active, the fish are relatively easy to catch. After a few weeks of pressure, however, you’ll notice a big difference. From afar, you may find a pool with fish feeding happily on the edges in sand and gravel, but the moment you step onto that gravel or sand, even if you’re 20 meters from the water, you’ll see the fish start to slide off into the depths. They don’t panic and flee, they just slide away. Fish in deeper water head down and root among the larger stones. These fish aren’t quite so alert, but getting a fly in their face is a challenge in itself.

Fish in running water can be easily approached, but are often very tough to catch. The challenges they present are some of my favourite. Here, the carp get into skinny running water, seeking safety in the pockets of fine gravel between large rocks. This can make for tricky fly presentation. You need to drift your fly right past the carp’s face and then react instantaneously to the bite.

The pressured shorelines of lakes see fish constantly moving in from the depths, meaning the fish tend to be less wary. But on rivers, the fish definitely react negatively to noisy shoreside conversation or sounds on the bank. When they’re spooky they’re MUCH tougher than trout, but this is solved by simply wading twenty meters where you’ll undoubtedly find an easier target.

Speaking of easy targets, carp dozing on the water’s surface during the middle of the day are usually very approachable, but they often don’t eat. A very slow sinking fly right in their face will sometimes warrant a bite.

Accuracy and Presentations

In spite of the folklore, carp can have great eyesight. I like to think they have a window of vision–a feeding window that they focus on. There are always going to be exceptions, but if you aim to get your fly into that window and you present it properly, most of the time, you’re in the game.

I prefer to use a 4 weight rod with 6 lb tippet for carp. A simple tapered leader around 11 feet will make landing a fish by yourself much easier. The reason I like a tapered leader is because they tend to be more accurate, and short-range accuracy is very important. I use a simple 7.5 ft tapered leader and add 3 feet of 6 lb tippet to the front (or I make my own leader out of sections of nylon).

They’ll Eat Most Trout Flies

Carp will certainly spook from a fly landing noisily or too close to them, but this can vary from fish to fish. Feeding fish are usually so focused that they’re not overly spooky. Fish that are looking for food, however, are on maximum alert. You’ll learn a lot about fish body language by watching them feed and react.

The combination of water turbidity, relatively poor sight, and constant roaming, carp are one of the few fish we can comfortably use the strip and drop presentation method on. This is when the fly is cast past the fish and then, before it sinks, is stripped back into the fish’s path where it is left to sink again. Watch for the yellow lips! This is a great technique for new fly anglers, especially those who want to learn how to sight fish.

*Note: don’t use this method on finicky fish, as it will scare them. Why? Fish simply don’t like being “attacked” by a fly.

My three favorite flies for carp are woolly worms in a variety of sizes, colours and weights. A small tan fuzzle bugger with a small bead head is a great fly (for me). As a dry fly, smaller grasshopper patterns have worked exceptionally well in the summer months when there are plenty of hoppers about. On clear water dams like Wyangala, carp will charge a twitched hopper from a couple of meters away to engulf it. Carp don’t require an extensive range of sophisticated patterns and most trout flies will work on them.

Learning to Feed the Fish

There’s a term that often pops up among experienced fly fishers. “Feed the fish”. What does this mean? It means presenting the fly in front of the fish so that it almost has to eat it… basically an offer that can’t be refused. Carp love to be fed the fly. It can be suspended or sunk slowly, but most of the time the best thing to do–especially if it looks like they haven’t seen it or are ignoring it–is to take it away from them a couple of times with short strips, and then let them eat it. Once you’ve provoked a chase, a carp will usually eat.

Carp are very efficient, lazy feeders that rarely need to hunt down their food. They prefer to eat food directly in their window. Exceptions are fish on gravel beds honed in on small yabbies and larger prey. These fish are typically more active, and such gravel beds invariably have cleaner water flowing over them. So, get the fly in the fish’s face and bring it to life with small twitches right as the fish approaches it.

To do this successfully we have to learn another lesson: reading the fish’s body language. The two principle reactions of a carp to a fly are to either ignore it or eat it. In my experience, if a fish seems to ignore (or avoid) the fly after several presentations, it’s mostly likely seen it and will continue to reject it on subsequent presentations. They aren’t stupid, and are actually considered to be one of the smarter sportfish.

It’s also important to remember that carp feed differently in certain waterways. Wyangala dam, for example, comes to mind. The dam is in the granite foothills of the western slopes, where impoundments don’t muddy up the water easily. There are far fewer silty corners where carp can root around in the mud, but there are so many fish that they inevitably group together.

The Wyangala carp are far more pelagic, often feeding on shrimp and baitfish. I’ve tracked them as they feed along the shoreline, showering up schools of bait in front of them. When comparing these carp to those from other dams, they have fine thin lips. Fish that do a lot of rooting around in mud, however, have large inflamed lips.

How to Fight Fish

The way a carp fights is dependent on a number of conditions. The health of the fish is obviously a factor, and post spawn fish can be pretty sluggish. Water temperature plays a great role, with high temps also means sluggish fights (mostly due to low oxygen). But considering that most of the carp we sight fish for are far larger than the average trout, we can learn a lot by fighting them. You’ll need sufficient backing on your reel (especially in the impoundments) and good knots. Good technique to turn, stop, and tire a fish is necessary, as these techniques will stand you in good stead wherever you fish.

It’s impossible to generalize how a carp will fight, but be prepared for them to take off or thrash around. Rolling a fish is just about the deadliest thing you can do during the fight, regardless of the species. Rolling a fish involves getting the rod tip under the water and pulling them from underneath to flip them over. Simply put, it destroys a fish’s moral. This technique can only be done once the fish is relatively close to shore. Once you’ve been able to practice this numerous times throughout the day, it’ll come in handy when fishing for a multitude of species found in the flats–especially if you are fishing light.

Carp are also a great fish to practise “pulling”. Learn to pull them from the angle that hurts them the most. This will help you to understand rod angles, the pressure we can put on fish, and the importance of good knots.

So go to it, hone your entire range of fly fishing skills on these fish, and just enjoy what they offer.
Find Peter at https://wildfish.com.au

The post What Fly Fishing For Carp Can Teach Us – Peter Morse appeared first on Anchored Outdoors.

By Peter Morse:

In his book, A Jerk on One End, art historian and keen fly angler, Robert Hughes, described the philosophical and psychological value of fishing as being akin to dropping a line of inquiry into the unconscious to see what monsters might be lurking there. Dredging contains these same values.

Dredging refers to blindly fish flies deep on fast sinking lines. It’s not the favored tactic of many; it’s thought to be artless and something that’s resorted to by those with no skill, or those who can’t see fish on the flats or make the required cast if they do. But it sure can get your arms stretched and your rod bent. 

All anglers like sight fishing. But fish aren’t always in the shallows or on the surface, and some species never come into shallow water let alone visit the surface—does this mean they aren’t a legitimate fly target, should we just completely ignore them? I think of everything that swims as a legitimate fly target and sometimes we need to go to extremes to engage with them. And there’s not a lot that’s simple about effective dredging.

Let’s face it, good steelheading or salmon fishing is mostly just dredging, yet it’s the acceptable way to fish for them. Good swingers are also very thoughtful about what they’re doing as they control angles, mends, drifts and weights through the water. Many anglers look down on dredging, and it’s what most least like to do—that, “I only sight-fish with a dry fly old chap,” sort of thing. But I say to hell with that.

These days we have the technology to fish deep, GPS and depth sounders give us a remarkable view of the substrate and everything in the water column with astonishing detail, at considerable depths. It means we can use this equipment to “sight” fish. We now have low stretch lines that sink like a stone, we have the rods and reels to deal with big fish down deep. 

In this game, tungsten and lead soon become your favorite fly-tying materials, and a small fly is tied on a 4/0 hook. It’s not the realm of IGFA leaders and wire is often a prerequisite, especially in the tropics. Being prepared to tie small ball sinkers into loop knots is also a big hurdle to overcome mentally. 

My own fascination with dredging goes back to the days of fishing off Sydney with Gordon Dunlop using LC13 shooting heads for a variety of species, including amberjack and yellowtail kingfish. Over the years, I’ve never hesitated to send a fly deep if required, because it’s not rocket science to figure out that most of the time there are many more fish lower in the water column. 

But this interest in fishing deep was really ignited one day when out of Perth, in Western Australia. I was part of a group of fly fishers were given a ride to chase samsonfish on a jig fishing charter boat with a bunch of jig fishers, and we were determined to get hooks into these fish using fly tackle regardless of depth. Samsons are closely related to amberjack and yellowtail. They gather in huge spawning aggregations off the southwest Australian coast often in around 100 meters of water. 

I wouldn’t call what we did fly fishing, but we were fishing with fly tackle. Craig Radford brought along a small open-mouthed basket loaded around the open rim with heavy sinkers. He packed it with chopped pilchards and it was strung on a thin rope with markers every 10 feet. I had a 14-weight Sage loaded with the densest line available at the time, T14, and loaded up a 12-inch flashy profile tube fly with two 10/0 hooks and a great gob of tungsten putty under the chin. 

The top of the school of fish was around 80 meters down in 100 meters of water and the jiggers were giving them hell and getting served right back as several rods exploded like firecrackers. Craig lowered and emptied the contents of the basket in a series of ascending drops from 80 meters and pretty soon the peak of the school came up to 50 meters. I had no doubt that if we could get the fly to the fish they would eat it so I sent the fly down.

Fortunately our drift on this particular morning was slow as there was little wind or current, and this is a key ingredient for what we wanted to do. I dumped the fly, the running line and armfuls of 50-pound GSP backing. When I figured the fly was deep enough I started to jig, cranking the backing onto the big reel. And then when I reached the running line I used a conventional retrieve. Bingo! It worked and we landed a trio of 40 to 50-pound samsons that morning before the wind got up. What fun it was.

Some years later, out of a barramundi lodge in northern Arnhem Land, where the tide windows in the rivers determine your day-to-day barramundi fishing, we dredged patches of deep rubble bottom offshore when the tide wasn’t right. In this location “deep” is between 30 and 50 feet, but these patches had seen almost no fishing pressure.

We had some pretty astonishing sessions out there on days when nothing showed on the surface but down deep over the reef it teemed with life and when you got the drift, the sink and the retrieve right, it was hang on tight time. There are so many willing fish down there it’s a lottery, but some are more prized than others. 

Big fingermark (golden snapper) were always at the top of our agenda—you can catch plenty of these as pan sized versions in the rivers, but the big ones are all offshore, they pull like stink and are a real prize. The key was to get the fly deep and keep working it in that deep zone without getting hung up on the bottom. These days, lines like T11 and T14, in conjunction with RIO’s low stretch metered shooting line make that a lot easier.

Bite offs are relatively frequent as mackerel and barracuda are always lurking around these patches. The fish down deep also never had far to go to get to a rocky outcrop, and we went through a lot of flies at times. We also learned that bigger flies are not always the answer. Ross Italiano had some small (size 1/0) Clousers wrapped with plenty of lead and tied on hefty hooks that easily out-fished all the best squid flies, Deceivers and big Clousers. We had some great sessions on those reefs.

Craig Radford has been a fast-sinking shooting head angler for more than few decades. Cortland’s LC13 shooting heads and a variety of different running lines were as sophisticated as fly rigs got in Western Australia 35 years ago; I doubt there was a floating line to be found west of the Nullabor Plains. The mackerel species were most fly anglers’ targets. Dredging reef points and known ledges with a burley (chum) trail was pretty much standard technique, but they caught some great fish including other creatures that came up the trail. 

Using readily available depth sounders, Craig and his son Adam have done amazing work fishing the depths off the Western Australian coast, targeting species such as the bottom-dwelling Western Australian Jewfish (aka dhufish). These are a deep water species that are prized as both a table fish and a sport fish. The fishery is tightly managed these days, but when it’s open, it’s on. 

Craig and Adam are now down to targeting individual fish marked on the sounder, usually in water between 25 and 35 meters deep. You need low wind and current conditions, which enable a very slow drift over the marked fish. Other species also get in on the game: pink snapper, samsonfish and other reefies more usually associated with baitfishing and chunks of lead, are frequently encountered. One day we engaged with a big school of feeding samsons, yellowtail kings and amberjacks, and although the action started deep the activity brought them to the surface.

Rules for fishing deep:

• Use enough rod weight and enough line grains.

• Shooting heads and low stretch running lines are a real bonus.

• Be prepared to add lead to your fly in the form of a ball sinker tied into the loop knot.

• Try and stay in touch with your fly at all times—i.e. don’t just dump line, it could get eaten at any stage, on the sink, on the dangle and on the retrieve.

• When you hookup, go very hard early.

• Expect anything. We’ve hooked marlin doing this—it came straight up and jumped right next to the boat throwing the hook at eye level.

• Be patient and fish smart.

• Work the fly hard when you get deep enough, strip 5 meters and sink again—repeat.

Episode #: 2 (click to listen)
Duration: 1 hr 24 min
Topics Discussed: Peter’s upbringing, views on shark conservation, Australia’s fishing industry and his television series that had an undeniable impact on the land down under. 
Buy Peter’s Book and DVD’s: A Few Great Flies and How to Fish Them, Wildfish with Peter Morse
Bio: Mention Peter Morse to just about any fly fisher in Australia and you’ll immediately have their attention. Peter was one of the first people to pioneer fly-fishing there, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Peter is the author of three books and is a certified Master caster, television personality and well traveled angler.

The post Don’t Sledge the Dredge – Peter Morse appeared first on Anchored Outdoors.