OUR MAN ON THE BANK
Carp aren’t taking surface baits now, right? Don’t you believe it…
EVERY now and then I get a crazy idea in my head, and this week was one of those times.
I just fancied making a ‘carp off the top in winter’ film for my Nature and Fishing YouTube channel so, with my cameraman
Ross Birnie, I set off on a chilly, wet and rainy February day to see if we could spot signs of feeding carp.
We picked my mate Steve Greenway’s venue near Wolverhampton, mainly because of its really good head of carp that hopefully would feed well even in the cold.
Now, I don’t generally fish such waters, but the weather has been very unkind to river anglers and I’m a great believer in not hitting your head against a brick wall just for the sake of it. I reckon a day of rod-bending action can keep our spirits high as we wait for the good times to return, and that’s what we aimed to show viewers of this short film.
Sure enough, we found carp coming up to take freelined breadcrust, which is as basic a tactic as it gets.
Ross got so close with his camera lens that you could practically look into the carp’s eyes, then witness a big mouth sucking the bread in and the water exploding as the hooked fish powered away.
Surface fishing for any species is special, and today was no exception. It was great having to strike to hook the fish, rather than use a self-hooking rig, and missing the odd ‘unmissable’ take only added to the fun.
It was interesting to see how things would go quiet then suddenly, when one carp came up, it would be joined by six of its mates before everything quietened down again.
I noted that some of the fish were dummies, and yet others – not always the
