Is it possible to target individual fish?

Question: When targeting an individual fish, how much do you look at the individual fish’s character when it comes to watercraft?

If you’re going to target an individual fish, as I often do, then it’s absolutely vital to take note of whatever little pieces of info you may have surrounding that fish. Of course you still need to do your bits and pieces, and looking is crucial. There’s nothing more solid to go on than what you see with your own eyes. I would never sacrifice my own groundwork for information handed down about a fish, but it’s always worth bearing in mind and a good base to your plan.

I soon discovered my target fish had a liking for yellow hookbaits, and went on to catch it on just that!

Some fish have far more of a routine than others and can almost seem easy to target, falling foul to the same areas time and time again. If this is the case then great, it’s something to work from and will often lead you in the right direction. I have fished for several big fish that have had this routine and the info that I have been given has proved fruitful in successfully targeting them. With this said, I have also seen fish with a so-called favourite area or routine get caught away from these said areas time and time again. This is where your own hard work and observation is key, after all, if they were that easy to target they’d get caught all the time in those zones, by anyone who slung a rig out there.

If there’s one thing that most big carp seem to love, it’s boilies

I once fished for a carp which spent an awful lot of time one area, I would often find her sat within the safety of a particular snag bush, and people naturally assumed that this would the best place to target her. In actual fact, she simply liked to lay up during the day. The swim that controlled this bush is one of the most popular on the lake, yet she was very rarely caught there and when she was, it was well away from the bush. Just because you see them there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll catch them there. Snags offer great holding areas and some carp just like to sit there before moving off to feed in other areas. I realised this relatively quickly and caught the fish just before midnight much further down the lake.

This snag-loving carp was rarely caught where you saw it most

Other carp I have fished for have clearly favoured an area and I have gone on to catch them from exactly where I and some others expected to do so. On one particular lake it was clear that 90% of my target’s captures came from the swims surrounding a large island, and for this reason I ignored all signs of fish in other areas and fish solely in a couple of swims I liked that controlled water around the island. There were lots of fish present in the lake, maybe 350 carp in total, the big one was a rare one and uncaught for almost a year, but by sticking to its favourite area I caught her as my 20th bite and on my 15th night. Had I chased the fish round the lake, fishing for bites, it could have been a totally different story.

I write absolutely everything down – I don’t want to forget a single piece of info, you never know when you might need it

There are no hard and fast rules and there’s a hell of a lot of things to take note of, the most important of all is where the carp bites actually come from, and of course where you see this fish most. All you can do is build on these two things, and use them to work out where its next bite will be from. If a fish shows signs of doing bites from particular areas, as big carp often do, then you can’t ignore that. Your evidence must be concrete if you’re going to base your location on this though. Sometimes it pays to ignore all else and sit it out at their favourite haunt, you just have to be careful you’re not wasting your time as they can easily be feeding elsewhere.

It’s a tough one to explain and I could go on forever, I almost have to contradict myself but in a nutshell, the things I look for most when targeting a carp are: where it gets caught from most and if there’s a pattern to the time of year. And of course, I look for the carp itself, watching your target and seeing for yourself what it does is, by far, the most important thing. If I’m unable to lay eyes on it, the favourite haunts are as good a place as any to fish until you have more physical info to build on. In an ideal world you’ll see the fish in it’s so-called favourite area, where it does its bites, and in this case you’re onto an absolute winner.