How many carp anglers wish to catch more carp but are stuck in a rut? Revealed here are some very crafty ideas to catch more fish that manipulate carp senses plus their responses to popular readymade and homemade baits. Discover how to exploit baits and bait substances to stimulate carp responses in your favour even more!

So many carp anglers today are seriously confused about bait and which ones to use. To make things very simple here is a method that really hedges your bets and ensures that whatever baits you use fish will be much more likely to respond favourably!

It is pretty obvious that most anglers today fall into 3 camps, those who use readymade baits all the time, those who use their own more economical homemade baits all the time and those who make their own homemade baits and maybe exploit aspects of readymade baits and commercial bait ingredients and liquids and so on in unique ways to make their baits different to normal.

The fact is that so many carp anglers understand so little about how carp actually experience baits...

Brit Mr Locke jumped out of his lakeside tent at 6am in temperatures of -3C to net the monster fish that tipped the scales at 94lbs.

The enormous mirror carp weighed the same as Kylie Minogue and beat the previous record by 3lbs.



The fish - nicknamed Lockey's Lump - was the first and only bite Mr Locke, 47, had during the week-long freezing fishing trip to the Rainbow Lake near Bordeaux in France.

Mr Locke was alerted to the catch when his rod alarm sounded during the early hours.

Wearing only a T-shirt and trousers, he jumped in his boat and motored 200 yards out to the fish and began reeling it in.

At first he thought he had hooked a sunken tree trunk due to the weight of it but was gobsmacked when he heaved the carp to the surface.

Getting it in his landing net was like 'trying to land a small hippo with a tennis racket,' but...

Now I think everyone will agree that the most important part of any carp fishing set up is the last few inches in the water, ie your rig and end tackle.

Yes a powerful long distance rod, hi-tec bait boat or top of the range food bait boilies all have their role to play in putting more fish on the bank, but get the last few inches wrong and all the rest counts for nothing!!!

With the inception of the hair-rig, carping took a huge leap forward in terms of hooking efficiency. All of a sudden it became easy. I remember in the early 80’s catching unheard of (for the time) numbers of fish. This was a time when you normally didn’t catch many and only the top boys like Rod Hutchinson and Kevin Maddocks produced the goods regularly. Their developments and people like them evened things up, and gave us a chance to catch carp. The Rig became all important.

A rig needs to be strong, reliable, tangle proof, abrasion resistant, and above all mechanically effective to allow you to hook the carp. So what are the main types of hooklink material on the...

Carp over forty pounds and more are caught on worm baits of various kinds; so to exploit something a little different read on now and reap big rewards!
I caught my first ever carp around 1975 -- on a worm for bait. Things in my carp fishing have changed very much since that time but worm baits of various kinds just keep catching. Being in horticulture it has been easy to get hold of enough worms to make homemade boilies and ground baits based on them. I have over the decades confirmed that some worms and worm products are far superior to others!

Unfortunately due to rising costs, the lobworm extracts often available today are synthetically-based and so are missing all those stimulatory amino acids in the profiles and ratios that carp love so much in lobworms. (Do check with your supplier if this is the case!) Most usually in reality these additives are composed of synthetic flavours, taste enhancers such as ribonucleotides and amino acids complexes etc, which despite trying; do not replicate the ideal...

It has been shown by scientists that chilids (the ‘perch-like fish,') establish a life-long feeding, mating and territorial ‘pecking-order,' by actually observing the fights and competitive feeding activities of their peers. This is ‘mirrored' in carp, and it is especially interesting for us, in big carp; so why not truly exploit this natural behaviour and achieve some exceptional catches!

To specifically target those biggest carp, you can really leverage bait and baiting techniques. You can induce a ‘competitive' escalation of ‘bait excited fish activity' in your swim, right up through the ranks of the more numerous smaller fish and in fact affect the feeding behaviour of the very biggest wariest carp.

I call it the accelerated ‘bait triangle effect.' You can get these biggest fish ‘charged-up' into a highly stimulated state of behaviour. Where the big fish want to feed, and are perhaps wary of the bait, but where their natural ‘top pecking-order status' and greed often take over in a...

Types of Carp Rods

When choosing carp rods you need to know what type of carp fishing you are going to be doing. You must be aware of whether you will be margin fishing, stalking, distance casting, float fishing, casting heavy leads or method feeders or maybe you just want a rod for spodding or as a marker float rod. The reason for this is that carp rods, like all fishing rods, come in a huge array of lengths, strengths, actions and test curves and are made from different materials. So let's take a look at the different features of carp rods and what they mean.
Carp Rod Length

The length of a carp rod can vary between 10 feet and 13 feet, but a good all round size is 12 feet. For stalking, where you may want to be scrambling amongst undergrowth or climbing trees with your rod in hand, a 10 foot rod can be more useful, and for distance fishing, where a good line pick up is required on a strike, a 13 foot rod will do the job, but the most common length for all round...

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