Well it is about that time that I post about another interesting carp blog, this time one about a Brit carp fishing a long way from home. Niblet’s blog at www.carpfishingblog.com is a blog written about a UK carp angler fishing in Australia. Remember that in Australia carp are considered vermin and an invasive species so it probably is not the easiest species to specialise in there. My hat goes off to him for persevering in difficult conditions to catch carp and have fun. Anyway check out his blog at http://www.carpfishingblog.com/ which appears to be frequently updated and in the current winter in Europe it is nice to see pics with the sun shining down 🙂 makes a difference to Bosbaan .
Author: quentyn
Eating on the bank – follow the astronauts example
For years when anglers have eaten on the bank they have been reduced to “Anything that fits in a frying pan or cant crawl out of one” or anything that has “pot noodle” on the outside. Both are perfectly acceptable food stuffs ( well apart from “nice and spicy” pot noodles…) but they suffer from either not being complete meals or needing to be stored carefully. I am sure that I am not the only one who on a multi night fishing trip has decided to push some food stuffs expiry date to the limit Diarrhea is nasty when you are near a porcelain loo, a disaster if you are out on the bank.
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Beating the ice at the Bosbaan in Amsterdam
Well it is a very glad Quentyn who is back from the Bosbaan leaving 1/2 way through a 2 day session. Normally I would be annoyed about leaving half way through planned session but after the 1st night i though I would quit whilst the going was good.
Here is a tip for you, if you are packing to go fishing and you shake your cooking gas bottle and think “hmm I wonder if there is enough in there for 2 days” there is not. The meerest action of checking ensures that there is not. Now in the summer you can get away with no hot water, in the winter it could be deadly. Well you have guessed it, during the 1st night I went to make a cup of tea and found that in the cold my gas bottle was almost empty with not really even enough grunt to warm 1 kettle of water. Lesson to be learned I feel and my thanks to Mick to popped along in the morning with a hot flask of tea which was very welcome.
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New World Record carp video now online
Image from http://www.telegraph.co.uk click image to go to their article
After the rather sad posting about Amsterdamse bos, it is nice to get a bit of positive news. Recently Martin Locke head honcho for Solar Tackle caught a word record mirror carp at Rainbow lakes in France. The beastie weighed in at 94lbs ( 42.6kg’s) and recently the video of the capture has been put up on Solar Tackle’s website here. This carp beat the previous fish from les Graviers The size of the fish has to be seen to be believed and he struggles to lift it due to the sheer size and weight. Even if you are not into carp fishing check it out and marvel that fish that size swim in European waters. The fish was caught in the winter at 94lb, will it top the 100lb mark if it is full of spawn ? When will the 100lb barrier be broken ? Will if be from France or from elsewhere ? Will the 91 from Luke Moffats Les Graviers take the title again ?
Anyway click here to see the video in all its glory
Oh to be back on the bank again
Cold and Grey….
Bosbaan can be a cold grey place at times, especially in the winter so it is with a heavy heart that I will drag myself out of bed tomorrow morning and head on over. Only joking I can hardly wait, I haven’t been on a proper carp session in months and I am itching to get out. I was meant to be out last weekend but it rained from 06:00 – 21:00 and the wimp in me won out. I consoled myself by believing that my PVA would just melt 🙂
Anyway here’s to a 2 day session on the bosbaan, which thankfully was not affected by the recent weather unlike Amsterdamse Bos which seems to have been completely wiped out. Tactics will be small bags of ccmoore bloodworm pellet with either a Meteor popup or a small fluro pop-up. Will scale everything down to size 8’s and lower and will probably use the rather excellent Fox Illusion fluorocarbon in 15lb bs.
Here’s hoping the fish are hungry !
Amsterdamse Bos Carp kill
It is with a heavy heart that I make this post. Today I was told by a colleague that when she was horse riding through Amsterdamse Bos that she had seen a lot of dead carp, so as I couldn’t get over to the water during the daylight I asked a friend of mine Marcel if he could pop by and see what was up. We knew that there were issues in the water in Amsterdamse bos but not to the extent that greeted Marcel.
Hundreds and hundreds of dead carp. When Marcel popped round to the other part of Bos to check the main pool he was greeted by an even more grizzly sight. What he thought were white birds popping up on the water were carp, bream and other fish dead as far as the eye can see.
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Attaching your hook bait to a Chod rig
For while a while the only way to attach your bait to a chod was to use the time honored tradition of tying it on with bait floss, however times have changes and as I posted here solar have got a really nifty way of attaching baits to rigs and not just for these kinds of rigs.
So with that in mind, as I hate tying on baits lets explore the different kinds of ways that we can attach baits to chod rigs.
Tying them on
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Tying the Chod rig using a Domhoff knot
The Chod Rig, where do we start ? At 1st glance it seems to be against all known rig principals. The hook link is super short and can be very stiff ( in the original format), there is a popup fished straight off the bottom, how can a fish be fooled by it ?
Well they are, and in large numbers. If you fish lakes with silt issues, with debris on the bottom ( often know as chod hence the name of this rig) that will get tangled in a normal rig… then this is the setup for you !
Effectively it is a standard helicopter rig with a very short hook link and a pop-up. It is worth pointing out that the rig has to be fished with a popup if the anti “chod” capabilities are to be realised else with a bottom bait the bait may lie in the detritus that you are trying to avoid. The anti silt capabilities are also helped by virtue of the helicopter rig in that you can fish the rig as far from the lead as you desire and if you add on a Solar bag clip with an in-line lead you can even fish a bag of freebies close by.
Another use for the rig, and certainly the one I have put it to most use, is that of a “roving rig” ie a rig that you want to cast out to showing fish, or one that you want to regularly move about in open water when you have little idea what the bottom composition is. If you cast in a rig using a lead clip with a short hook link and you end up casting into 2ft of silt then you are unlikely to catch. With a “chod rig” you know that the rig is working as designed no matter what the bottom is. This was a tactic that I put to good use in France last year and my “roving rod” was set up with a chod rig and single Ccmoore strawberry pop-up. This rig with no freebies and just by moving it every few hours ( or when ever I remembered to be honest) picked up 1-2 bonus fish per day. Anyway onto the rig… Continue reading “Tying the Chod rig using a Domhoff knot”
Beginners rigs – Where to start if you are beginning carp fishing
Please note, this article was originally created as a PDF, I have posted it here as convenience and to make it more web friendly
All of us at one stage started somewhere in our carp fishing lives, and I think that it is sometimes easy to forget that there are beginners coming to the sport all of the time. Recently we have seen many people starting Carp fishing who have not had an apprenticeship from catching skimmers as a child under a father’s watchful eye to later, migrating to carp or another specimen species.
This leads beginners to wonder “ where do I start ?” and often they start by pouring through the magazines for the latest wizz bang rig that uses £8 of swivels and tubing and then they end up blanking. They blank not through lack of enthusiasm but because they didn’t have the confidence to realize that simple is most likely better. Some of the rigs you see in the magazines have been designed for really specialized applications that 99% of us will never see. The cynic in me also suspects that they are to sell magazines and tackle :).
Carp fishing is all about confidence, confidence in your bait, tackle and rigs, in this article I want to cover some really basic rigs that I wish that I had known when I started carping some 24 years ago ( though with a 10 year break). A lot of what you will see here might have been covered by other anglers but I want to boil the rigs down to the very essence of what they need to be. Once you have gotten experience with these rigs feel free to move onto other more complicated rigs as if you have the basics right then you can’t go too far wrong. Continue reading “Beginners rigs – Where to start if you are beginning carp fishing”
Flurocarbon rigs – the ultimate in simplicity
Fluorocarbon, when it was first released to the angling community several years ago it suffered from many issues namely that it was brittle and super stiff. The brittleness was resolved but the stiffness remained. Recently Fox released their new product, Illusion soft fluorocarbon and i am pleased to say that stiffness in fluorocarbon hook links is a thing of the past. The hook link is softer and more supple and like all fluorocarbons is practically invisible in water as it is a refractive index close to that of water. Some anglers mistakenly fish with red coloured lines believing that as red is the first colour to disappear the deeper you go that their red lines are therefore “invisible”, the anglers who know a thing or two use fluorocarbon as it truly is invisible.
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The Masterblanker 