Summer on top

The arrival of the summer months is one of my favourite times of the year as it means I can practice what I most enjoy about carping, fishing on the surface. I absolutely love watching carp taking baits off the top and there’s no adrenaline rush like watching a fish near the hookbait and then eventually take it.

My favoured method is getting the carp in close and selecting out the fish I want to catch. It takes a lot of patience to do this as very often you need to spend upwards of an hour feeding them streams of surface bait. It sounds easy, but when you’re fishing for spooky fish, all it takes is for one of them to spook on something and you can be back at square one.

Only this evening I fed a group of six carp Mixers for almost an hour, and before I’d even had chance to cast the hooker out, one of the smaller ones came up for a bait and spooked the rest of the group. The carp lost all of their confidence and they wouldn’t come within eye shot for quite some time. An hour or so later, just as it was going dark they eventually came in close, but it was too difficult to pick out which fish was which so I had to abandon it for another day.

The key to getting carp in close is to feed Mixers one by one, the aim being to create as little water disturbance as you can. Catapulting or hand throwing handfuls seems to put them more on edge and they end up being much more wary which makes the job that little bit harder. It pays to be as stealthy as you can, even on the lakes where they appear to be fine with anglers making noise on the bank.

I love flavouring my Mixers, and my current favourites are Dairy Cream with a slight touch of Esterblend. You can be quite generous with the Dairy Cream, and I generally use it at a level of 30ml per kilo of dry baits. With the Esterblend, however, this is a very powerful additive and I prefer it used at a low dosage of only 3ml per kilo which is enough to make it noticeable. The extra attraction does Mixers the world of good, and you’ve only got to watch how quickly the carp close by begin searching for food once they get a whiff of it.

I’ve done quite well recently, fishing one of my local ponds which doesn’t contain anything massive, mainly doubles and twenties. Fishing short three-hour trips after work I’ve had some nice fish, including three nice mirrors that I singled out from the smaller fish and targeted. The best looking one was a fish I particularly wanted to catch as its believed to be one of the Leney strain which are quite rare in the north of England where I live.

With a bit of patience and the right bait, it just shows that even when time is limited you can have some success with your local carp in the summer months. If you’ve one or two good fish to go at, you never know, you might just hit the jackpot, so get out there stalking them in close as nothing quite beats the buzz that this type of fishing brings.

All the best for July and August.

Crowy