How To Fish For Carp

Hi, I'm Gavin Hodgson, fly fishing instructor and manager of Grangers Fishing Tackle here in South Kensington, London. We're going to talk you through some of the techniques and tips and how to get started in fishing. Okay, carp fishing.

First of all, we have a number of ways to fish for carp. We can fish for them the conventional way which would be with bait, floats, sitting waiting for things to happen and we carry a small amount of the equipment for that here. One of the things that is very important, large net for carp, absolutely.

Floats, weights, hooks, and many fish people will fish a barbless hook, it helps unhooking them, of course. And we even carry things like false maggots. Now, we aren't a bait fishing shop here, but we certainly carry the equipment to help people get kitted out.

What we do when we fish for carp, we use flies. So we would use a fly outfit instead of a conventional outfit. Now this would be an example of a conventional outfit: thick spool reel, about a ten foot rod, fairly strong rod.

This would be the equipment for fly fishing for carp. Now for fly fishing for carp, we would have this rigged up with a good backing line, twenty-pound string would probably cover it for most things, a nine weight line would be ideal and we'd fish that with pretty sizable flies when trying to imitate what people would put in the lakes for carp. So things like bread, things like biscuits, people bait fish these fish to the surface, get them to feed, we would then approach them with the fly and do quite well.

Carp will feed in every other way a fish will feed, they'll feed on natural and they'll feed on things that are supplied into the water. So as we approach it, we would think about things that the fly watching from the bottom of the lake to the surface and we would try and imitate. Many people who would be baiting the water would then just be copying the bait that they're throwing out there, so we would approach things slightly different, but once we catch a fish, this is quite important, this is a hammock to take care of the carp.

This is just a simple process of protecting the fish before we weigh it and hopefully release it. Flies wise, I would say ask your local shop because all waters are different. We would supply a range of fairly plushy dry flies, things that are easy to float, a range of nymphs which are going to imitate the aquatic life, the fly life in the water, and hopefully we've managed to fool them. .