Surface Fishing For Carp By: Alex Hunt

Watercraft is a skill learnt over time and in this case I will use my knowledge to locate carp in a lake. To start with I will look at how the weather has been over the last day or so, this gives me an idea of where to start as fish like to follow a new wind especially if it is warm. If the wind is pushing onshore it is going to be hard keeping the bait going in as it will just float back towards you, if the wind is cross shore it is going to be difficult to get the fish feeding along the same swim and it will also be difficult to keep the float in the same place although there is a technique that gets around this.

My favourite bait is dog biscuit; it has similar oil and protein contents to a good carp bait that the fish seem to love. It floats and degrades fairly quickly, usually over an hour or so although we hope it has been eaten by then!

I start by catapulting the bait into the water from an upwind bank, this way the bait floats out into the lake. On the lake that I fish, people use spods to put out bottom baits and the carp have become use to this noise and think of it as a dinner gong! I lever this technique to my advantage and also use a spod (a small aerodynamic container that holds bait) to put bait into the swim making lots of noise on the water in the process. If you have surfaced fished before you will know that carp make a slurping noise, so I real the spod back in small steps making a slurping type noise to get the message out. If there are carp in your swim they are sure to home in on the area as the bait begins to release its oils into the water causing a feeding trigger.

If fish do not appear after say 5 minutes then you know they are not there and it is worth moving to a new swim. Once the fish start feeding my plan is to get a shoal of them competing for the dog biscuit. I do this by feeding the dog biscuit into the same area. This has the affect of making a slick stream that carries itself across the lake. Fish are naturally inquisitive and will follow this trail upwind to you. Even if it is a big lake the fish will follow the dog biscuit to its source and this is the trick, slowly decrease the amount of bait so that there is enough for the fish to compete for but not enough to drift off into the distance. If you have ducks, geese or other birds and course fish in the lake you might be lucky that they sit at the back of your swim eating the spare, thus keeping the carp from drifting off!

The next step is to cast to them without spooking them, I do this by using a special flat float. I use these as I used to get many false takes when carp actually sucked my bobble float or controller float in! The flat liner type floats are excellent for this. You will also need floating mainline and floating leader, you don’t want the fish to spook off sub surface line if they are feeding on the surface.
Next comes the bait, I have tried dozens of different ways of putting dog biscuit on the hook but recently there has been a new product released on the market – a plastic dog biscuit imitation!
I attach one of these using a hair rig and counter balance it with the supplied shot. I also like these fake biscuits as the wildlife seem to know that they are not real yet the carp don’t so you can fish close to wildlife without the worry of them picking them up. I have had over 10x30s and 200x20s using them so I know they work.

I cast the bait over the back of the feeding fish so not to spook them and then slowly reel the bait back to the feeding fish. If they are feeding hard they will not notice and you may judge how close you cast out. It is then just a matter of time before you get a take and real the fish in. Please keep feeding the bait little and often and the results will come. I also throw out bait during a fight as the fish continue to feed so you don’t want them to stop!


I will add more techniques to my Carp Fishingseries soon so keep looking back for more articles.

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