Starting Carp Fishing For Big and Small Fish! By Tim Richardson

How many times have you gone fishing with high hopes and even seen fish actively feeding in your swim but returned home fishless? It may leave you pulling your hair out trying to understand why you did not catch! Many of the obstacles to you catching more big fish can be easily solved as you will see...

A few of the reasons can be seen very easily if you try fishing for smaller carp which are also very much pressured fish. It makes sense to practice your entire fishing approach for some time on a convenient smaller fish water or series of waters, until you can overcome very many obstacles to catching bigger fish. But I’m not just referring to practicing catching easy smaller constantly hungry fish, far from it. I’m talking about fooling smaller fish which are far from easy to catch on your usual big carp rigs, methods and standard approaches.

Of course there are very many waters such as match fishing venues which are purposely designed to provide frantic sport. Such over-stocked fisheries most often mean fish are constantly feeding and competing to get at any bait just too simply survive. Fishing such waters on conventional big carp

rigs, baits and tackle is often a meaningless affair unless you do things very scientifically in order to sort out in your mind issues of personal confidence regarding fish behaviour or relative rig performance and dimensions etc.

Far too many carp anglers go straight into carp fishing expecting big fish without ever having spent time learning fishing and appreciating many aspects which may not seem relevant or even apparent to new carp anglers. The fishing for small carp is nothing to be embarrassed about at all because you will certainly learn more by catching fish then blanking repeatedly!

I remember catching my personal best fish on small fish waters a kid starting out in carp fishing while dabbling in most other forms of fishing too. This experience or general apprenticeship of quite a few years included fishing for pike, trout, tench, bream, roach, eels, perch, bass, flounders and dabs, crucian carp, dace and chub, and also match-fishing in both the freshwater and sea fishing arenas. It also included reservoirs, small farm ponds, old estate lakes, small and large rivers, saline estuaries, canals, clay pits and gravel pits of assorted sizes.

All this definitely provided me with extensive advantages over anglers having never done all this. Over the last 35 years I must have fished for carp at probably about 100 venues regularly and over another 100 on odd occasions and it makes for very interesting and nostalgic reading, listing the venues and remembering all those fond memories!

Just as a bit of fun I fished a small farm pond where I last fished about 1982. The biggest fish I caught from there was 7 and a quarter pounds and the biggest in there at the time was a massive 9 pounds! But everything is relative and the bigger fish were not easily fooled! In fact I caught a 12 pound mirror from a different farm pool and discovered this to be the largest resident which was very rarely caught! Anyway, I used bread crust and caught a fish within minutes of arriving at exactly the same weight as the average fish from this pond in 1982. It was very special to think that this fish was quite a lot older than me (and I was 42 at the time.) But that hungry fish was tiny, only weighing in at a stunted 5 pounds but I treasure the picture of it and what it represents to me personally and in terms of the enduring survival of the water and the fish still surviving there... In these days of instant commercial fisheries, where fast growing strains of carp and legally imported carp are the fare of those anglers who can afford the ticket prices, big fish are often far less than half the age of that tiny one of 5 pounds.

It makes you think; for example, I caught a 48 pound mirror at Rainbow Lake in France which literally had the bodily proportions of a fish of only double figures that you might find in a doubles water in the UK; this fish was simply growing fast at an incredible rate. Such fish to me do not look quite right as a result and the weight was quite meaningless except for being of scientific interest regarding the growth rate these fish are achieving.

This fishing bait secrets ebooks author has many more fishing and bait edges - just one could impact very significantly on your catches!

By Tim Richardson.