How to stack the odds in your favour

Okay, I thought I’d put my own subject into the mix for this issue – one I’d welcome any of the other contributors to add their thoughts and experiences too. Something that’s been on my mind (again) is how and why some big ‘uns can prove elusive. Not so much elusive because they very rarely ever get caught at all, but more about why certain known fish might prove difficult for some anglers to catch - bogey carp if you like.

A moment we all live for: watching dawn break with a big ’un in the net

Being in-tune

I can think of plenty of waters where I’ve really had to go through them before eventually catching the one that I joined for, enough for me to recognise that it’s not always a case of just being lucky or unlucky. When it comes to catching the one you want most out of the rest of the stock, there will always be an element of luck involved. Obviously I know all that, and I also know it’s important to balance out the long campaigns – those where we might have caught everything in the lake over and over before the big ‘un has eventually come – with the other far shorter campaigns where we’ve rather luckily winkled out the big ‘un within the first few trips. Swings and roundabouts, ups and downs, I know all that, but the seesaw is beginning to look a bit lop-sided.

Perhaps it’s not wise to use statistics in fishing, after all there is a bit of luck involved, whatever anyone says, but if there were only twenty carp in a lake then surely it would stand to reason that the one you want most is likely to pay you a visit within around twenty bites. Fair? Add in the view that the biggest is supposedly the greediest and maybe those odds could even be shortened. If you happened to catch fifty odd carp from that same water, i.e. plenty of repeat captures, but still no Mr. Big ‘Un, then we could easily put that down to simply being a little unlucky. The thing is, when it happens again and again and again, you begin to wonder.

On many waters the biggest resident acts as part of the pack and it gets caught with all the rest. There’s often no need to change your approach, you just catch as many carp as you can and eventually the big ‘un rolls into the net. The thing is, that’s not been the case with a lot of the target fish I’ve fished for. I’ve found that the more carp there are in the lake, and the bigger the gap between the big ‘uns size and the rest of the stock, the higher the likelihood of that big ‘un doing its own thing.

The good anglers might be in-tune, belting around the lake, chasing the bulk, moving onto showing, feeding fish and really getting amongst them, but in the meantime that lazy old big ‘un might not have changed its habits one bit. If anything, the bulk are serving as a distraction. Big fish are creatures of habit, he might live in that quiet snaggy corner in the day and then out he comes for a little feed each night, often the same spots, and undisturbed he might keep that routine up for weeks on end. I think this is one reason why some big fish can go long periods without capture, and then suddenly, once someone gets things right and hooks it, i.e. it has its routine disrupted, it’s then forced out and about. Now it’s vulnerable it might even do two or three captures in quick succession before settling down into a quiet, unmolested routine again.

End tackle

Something I’ve often thought about is how some anglers don’t catch so many, but what they do catch are often the big ones. I’ve gone through purple patches like this myself, especially on low stock waters and with presentations like Hinge and Chod Rigs. I remember writing a few words about ‘obtrusiveness of tackle’ in my first book, in relation to Hinged Stiff Links and how they seemed to pick up the bigger fish. I think I said something along the lines of: the bigger the fish, the less noticeable, or the less obtrusive a big hook and wiry Amnesia boom section is likely to appear to it. I’m not suggesting that a ‘big fish rig’ won’t catch small carp, I’ve caught plenty of small- and medium-sized carp as well as countless tench whilst using Hinge and Chod Rigs, but if it’s small fish I want to catch then I can easily think of better rigs to use than those two.

Somewhere we can easily see the benefits of a subtle presentation is when fishing on the surface. I’m sure most of us have been in situations where we’ve had to fine down our floater kit to get takes. The fish might be slurping down every freebie you catapult out, but you can see that they’re swirling and turning sharply away from the hookbait every time. That size 8 hook attached to wiry 15lb line clearly isn’t the one, so sensibly you fine down to a size 10 with 10lb line and from that point on pretty much every carp that approaches the hookbait follows through and takes it without caution. Suddenly you’re catching plenty and it’s clear that the more subtle presentation has done the trick. This is the thing though, maybe if you’d stuck with the beefier presentation the one and only carp that might have eventually followed through would have been the big ‘un, old Pacman. You get what I mean. Crudeness of tackle can definitely be a factor in which fish we catch, ‘fish crude, catch big’ as it were.

Sometimes certain fish can be very localised in their habits, and if you’re not fishing where they’re living then you might as well be a million miles away

Carp food

Bait is surely another factor when it comes to which fish we catch. It’s common knowledge that a boilie only approach, with no pellets or seed tends to catch the bigger fish. That’s boilies doing what they were originally intended for: being selective, but there are other selective baits out there too, and if you’re using something other than boilies and you’ve managed to catch pretty much everything in the lake, yet you still haven’t caught the very biggest, then maybe it’d be a bit early to jump to conclusions and blame your bait for not catching one fish out of many.

Whatever bait you’re using, it stands to reason that if everything else in the lake eats it then it’s highly likely that the big one will also eat it. Saying that, even when you’re using a bait which you know the big fish like, the amount being used can still have a big influence on the size of carp we catch. I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of using too much bait, and although I’ve had some great spells of fishing whilst using plenty, when I get thinking about the amount of my big fish which have come on either singles or over very small amounts of bait it’s kind of telling.

Swings and roundabouts. A lovely Oxfordshire common, the biggest in the lake and on my very first trip

Wasing’s Lumpy. I know of eight captures since my time on the water, all from the same two swims. If you were to try targeting him somewhere else you might be there a while

Location

Much of the time I believe it has little to do with rigs or bait, it’s more of a location thing, i.e. fishing the right area for that particular fish. Some fish are really localised in their habits. I’ve seen this most recently at Wasing, where I’ve caught certain fish from the same swims each time. One of the more friendly characters is an old chunky mirror called Lumpy. He reminds me of the old Pet in Priory, so ugly only his mum could love him, but at the same time he’s got something about him that I like. Anyway, I can think of eight captures of this fish over the last year or so that I’ve been fishing there. I’ve caught it four times myself, from two different swims which face the same large chunk of water, and all four of its other captures have also been from those same two swims. That’s where he lives, and if you were to target that fish from any other part of the lake you might be there a long time.

The Parrot went through a similar spell last year through the winter, spring and early summer, doing four captures through that period of time, all from the same two swims. On all but one of those captures it came as the only take of the trip for that angler. In fact, other than one time when the captor managed a small carp with it, every other capture of that fish over the last year or so has been the only carp of the trip. This on a water were multiple catches are commonplace.

The Parrots last two captures, at the time of writing, have come within those anglers first two or three bites from the water. I’m certainly not knocking that, as winkling out the big one early on is something I’ve been fortunate enough to do myself plenty of times over the years, but to put some perspective on it, I’ve managed over 170 fish in the last year yet it’s not paid me a visit. I’m not whingeing, Wasing is one place I’ve really enjoyed my fishing. I’ve had a lovely time and I’m happy not to have to caught the big ‘un too early on. I tend to move on to pastures new pretty quickly whenever I’m lucky enough to catch the biggest resident, and to my mind there’s too many nice looking fish in Wasing for that. Even so, it’s obviously got to the stage now where I’ve started wondering. Can it really be put down to coincidence, chance and luck, or is it something more?

The long drawn out campaigns are often the ones which leave us with the most cherished memories. Yateley North Lake’s Bazil, March 95

Other stats

I can think of other waters I’ve fished in recent times where if you look at these kind of things statistically it’ll pickle your mind. Like the previous pool I concentrated on which only had two carp in: a little ‘un and a big ‘un. The little ‘un had never even been caught before. It was old and dark with a tiny mouth barely big enough to get my thumb in, the sort of carp you might imagine only eating six small snails a day, whilst the mirror was big and fat and screamed boilie eater. If a fortune teller had told me that I’d be lucky enough to manage three takes over four months fishing there, I would have thought it odds on that the mirror would be one of them, not the same little common three times! How can that happen?

Swings and roundabouts, ups and downs, carp fishing’s full of them. You have to be able to take the good with the bad, the unlucky with the lucky, it can go both ways. I remember winkling out the Lenwade big ‘un within a few minutes of my first visit a few years ago. It was a spur of the moment thing that I’d even gone at all. I remember packing away from Dinton, driving home, rushing around sorting out all my kit and then setting off to Norfolk in the middle of the night. The drive to the lake was longer than I imagined, three hours odd, but in the half-light of dawn I drove through the gates for the very first time. Straight in front of the gates the lake was almost shielded from view by a bank of trees, but jumping out of the car and peering through the foliage I could just about make out water. As I struggled for my first glimpse of the lake I heard a carp clatter out somewhere up to the right, and so I quickly trotted up the track until coming to the first swim, which as luck would have it was free.

The ripples were still spreading and I could see at least two fish were bubbling up just three or four rod lengths out. At that same moment it started raining, and so I figured I’d just flick a couple of singles out to where the bubbling was going on, and then I could make a much-needed brew after the long drive. It was the beginning of a new adventure, and I was looking forward to having my first walk around a bit later on once the rain had stopped.

The rods were still set-up from Dinton, and so in double quick time two baits were flicked out and the rods were rested on a single buzzer bar, with the butts on the floor and the tips in the air, after all this was meant to be a temporary thing. As I turned and walked back to the car parked on the track behind me, one of the buzzers let out a single bleep… Short story even shorter, it turned out to be the big ‘un. I’ll never forget the friendly locals. One who was fishing opposite later came round and said how he’d seen huge great bubbles coming up where I’d caught it from the evening before. “The size of hen’s eggs they were, the size of hen’s eggs…” Brilliant!

We all deserve a bit of luck from time to time, funny old game. Keep catching ‘em.