carp flies

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Martin

Fly fishing - Fish Better

anyone have any suggestions about flies for carp? i know that nymphs are probobly the way to go but i could use a few specific designs. Also i would like to know what the best way to approach them in a small river would be.

There are so many variables to your question that it is hard to answer. There are a lot more specifics to Carp fishing than I thought when I first took it up. When the mulberrys are ripe in the DC area you can find Carp waiting under the trees and a black deer hair ball about the size of a......well, mulberry, works great. I have had zero luck casting to moving fish. That is traveling fish rather than milling or tailing fish. Are the small rivers that you are talking about fast and clear or slow and muddy. Or maybe somewhere in between. Stalking them is fun but you really can spook them if you are not careful. And the jump not only at the sight of you but at the sight of line hitting the water. When they are mudding they are better targets. They are face down and concentrating on the bottom. A brownish or reddish nymph thrown into the area where they are feeding can get them. The book Carp On The Fly by Renolds, Befus and Berryman is a pretty good read. It covers a huge area of fly fishing for the Golden Bones. You can get it brand new on Amazon for as little as ten bucks. Have fun and check your backing.

thanks for the insight. the river i fish is about 40ft across at most and is usually slow flowing and relativey clear, the carp can be extremely spooky and the other day i had to drift a run full of large fish for over an hour before oi got one two pounder. it was a test of endurance and patience that no other kind of fish has been able to give me. im beggining to think that the really big ones only bitea fly under almost perfect conditions with a perfect drift.

I had a lot of tough times trying to figure Carp out. The best success that I have had is like this. I tie a ratty looking reddish, brownish, orangeish nymph and I weight it well. I use a long hook. Maybe 3X or longer in a size #10. I wrap .035 lead free round wire from just over the point of the hook to about an eigth of an inch from the eye to leave space for a head. I wrap over a thin layer of super glue to hold the wire from spinning. Tie on a few fibers of anything for a tail and dub something really fuzzy and light brown or orange for a body. Finish the head with some kind of light softish hen hackle of varying lengths and give it a try. There are so many things that Carp eat that live on the bottom that getting anal about tying immitations is a waste of time for me. Cast well upstream of the fish and let the fly float down and under them. Twitch it along like a big nymph struggling along in life and if they see it they will suck it up. Look at how excited I was in this picture. I peed my pants. I caught this 28 inch, fourteen pound Carp on a messy little barbless fly like the one I described.

Thanks, Martin. The other files were too big to post. DOH!!!

The Carp was my first one on a new rod I had picked up a few days before. It was a 7 foot 8 inch Sage four weight. I was just trying it out on the big Shellcrackers in the Shennandoah River and I saw the Carp lolling under a huge log. I had the nymph on and threw it above the fish a few times until if got right under it's nose. It glided over sucked it up. The fish fought for one hour and fifteen minutes. A man and his son watched the whole thing. They thought that I was fighting a huge Brown Trout. The man offered to take my picture. When I went in to revive the fish he exploded from my hands and swam out to a school of tailing Carp and commenced feeding like nothing had happened. There were twenty pound Carp in the school but I had to meet my wife about thirty minutes before so I left. Since then I have returned to the same spot with similar luck.

Speaking of luck, I am off to the National Park to try my new Ross on some Brook Trout. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hello there,
in our country carp is fish number one, so they introduce this fish too much to our rivers and lakes! They are everywhere! But its still not to easy to get them on fly, like Esox wrote: Messy, dirty small nymphs, very small streamers and buzzers. In rivers we fish for them with short nymph and its luck to catch them somewherein a school and fight im streams is very hard! But in still watters or slow parts of rivers a lot of guyes here fish for them nearly like for a rainbows!!! And there is picture form czech tiyer and he named this fly somethink like a carp killer.......

Hi
We have a local flyfisher, Sean Mills, here in Cape Town, who seems to catch carp at will. Almost like walking into a candy store and taking candy from the shelves.
He has developed a couple of flies (carp bugger is one) and techniques to catch them.
He rates them extremely spooky, far more than trout.
We've had some good results with Czech nymphing flies and techniques as well.
Will contact him and see if he can't share his secrets here on Global Flyfisher.

Korrie

In this months The American Carper there is an article on Carp flies. That organization is a mostly big hardware type for Carp fishing but they have been softening to the fly enthusiasts among them. I don't know if it is possible to bring in a fifty pound Carp on a fly rod. It isn't like a fifty pound Striped Bass. It is like a 300 pound Striped Bass.

Nice fish. usually i have to resort to corn to get a beast like that. The carp in my river are about twice as spooky and about five times as strong as anything else that swims in there. Ive got a picture of a twenty pounder that i caught in a pond near the river on and eight wieght fly rod with corn as bait. Im five foot eight, the mouth is at my chin and the tail is just past my knees. I think it might have been a little larger than twenty pounds on second thoughts. the carp over here are great, only me and a handful of other people actually fish for them.

I spoke last week with my friend, who is usuallely fishing in our non-trouts waters and he told that hes got over than thousand carps on fly. 75procents from ponds and lakes on chironomid emerger and rest from rivers caught on ordinary nymphs. He told me that in still waters is not important fly but technique and thats secret as he said! I saw pictures of carps about 15 up to 20 pounds, bigger as he said "its not possible to stop them form bank". SO I dont know anything... But he promissed me, that hes gonna take me but at summer... :cry:

There are so many variables to your question that it is hard to answer. There are a lot more specifics to Carp fishing than I thought when I first took it up. When the mulberrys are ripe in the DC area you can find Carp waiting under the trees and a black deer hair ball about the size of a......well, mulberry, works great. I have had zero luck casting to moving fish. That is traveling fish rather than milling or tailing fish. Are the small rivers that you are talking about fast and clear or slow and muddy. Or maybe somewhere in between. Stalking them is fun but you really can spook them if you are not careful. And the jump not only at the sight of you but at the sight of line hitting the water. When they are mudding they are better targets. They are face down and concentrating on the bottom. A brownish or reddish nymph thrown into the area where they are feeding can get them. The book Carp On The Fly by Renolds, Befus and Berryman is a pretty good read. It covers a huge area of fly fishing for the Golden Bones. You can get it brand new on Amazon for as little as ten bucks. Have fun and check your backing.

thanks for the insight. the river i fish is about 40ft across at most and is usually slow flowing and relativey clear, the carp can be extremely spooky and the other day i had to drift a run full of large fish for over an hour before oi got one two pounder. it was a test of endurance and patience that no other kind of fish has been able to give me. im beggining to think that the really big ones only bitea fly under almost perfect conditions with a perfect drift.

I had a lot of tough times trying to figure Carp out. The best success that I have had is like this. I tie a ratty looking reddish, brownish, orangeish nymph and I weight it well. I use a long hook. Maybe 3X or longer in a size #10. I wrap .035 lead free round wire from just over the point of the hook to about an eigth of an inch from the eye to leave space for a head. I wrap over a thin layer of super glue to hold the wire from spinning. Tie on a few fibers of anything for a tail and dub something really fuzzy and light brown or orange for a body. Finish the head with some kind of light softish hen hackle of varying lengths and give it a try. There are so many things that Carp eat that live on the bottom that getting anal about tying immitations is a waste of time for me. Cast well upstream of the fish and let the fly float down and under them. Twitch it along like a big nymph struggling along in life and if they see it they will suck it up. Look at how excited I was in this picture. I peed my pants. I caught this 28 inch, fourteen pound Carp on a messy little barbless fly like the one I described.

Thanks, Martin. The other files were too big to post. DOH!!!

The Carp was my first one on a new rod I had picked up a few days before. It was a 7 foot 8 inch Sage four weight. I was just trying it out on the big Shellcrackers in the Shennandoah River and I saw the Carp lolling under a huge log. I had the nymph on and threw it above the fish a few times until if got right under it's nose. It glided over sucked it up. The fish fought for one hour and fifteen minutes. A man and his son watched the whole thing. They thought that I was fighting a huge Brown Trout. The man offered to take my picture. When I went in to revive the fish he exploded from my hands and swam out to a school of tailing Carp and commenced feeding like nothing had happened. There were twenty pound Carp in the school but I had to meet my wife about thirty minutes before so I left. Since then I have returned to the same spot with similar luck.

Speaking of luck, I am off to the National Park to try my new Ross on some Brook Trout. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hello there,
in our country carp is fish number one, so they introduce this fish too much to our rivers and lakes! They are everywhere! But its still not to easy to get them on fly, like Esox wrote: Messy, dirty small nymphs, very small streamers and buzzers. In rivers we fish for them with short nymph and its luck to catch them somewherein a school and fight im streams is very hard! But in still watters or slow parts of rivers a lot of guyes here fish for them nearly like for a rainbows!!! And there is picture form czech tiyer and he named this fly somethink like a carp killer.......

Hi
We have a local flyfisher, Sean Mills, here in Cape Town, who seems to catch carp at will. Almost like walking into a candy store and taking candy from the shelves.
He has developed a couple of flies (carp bugger is one) and techniques to catch them.
He rates them extremely spooky, far more than trout.
We've had some good results with Czech nymphing flies and techniques as well.
Will contact him and see if he can't share his secrets here on Global Flyfisher.

Korrie

In this months The American Carper there is an article on Carp flies. That organization is a mostly big hardware type for Carp fishing but they have been softening to the fly enthusiasts among them. I don't know if it is possible to bring in a fifty pound Carp on a fly rod. It isn't like a fifty pound Striped Bass. It is like a 300 pound Striped Bass.

Nice fish. usually i have to resort to corn to get a beast like that. The carp in my river are about twice as spooky and about five times as strong as anything else that swims in there. Ive got a picture of a twenty pounder that i caught in a pond near the river on and eight wieght fly rod with corn as bait. Im five foot eight, the mouth is at my chin and the tail is just past my knees. I think it might have been a little larger than twenty pounds on second thoughts. the carp over here are great, only me and a handful of other people actually fish for them.

I spoke last week with my friend, who is usuallely fishing in our non-trouts waters and he told that hes got over than thousand carps on fly. 75procents from ponds and lakes on chironomid emerger and rest from rivers caught on ordinary nymphs. He told me that in still waters is not important fly but technique and thats secret as he said! I saw pictures of carps about 15 up to 20 pounds, bigger as he said "its not possible to stop them form bank". SO I dont know anything... But he promissed me, that hes gonna take me but at summer... :cry:

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