Fish with JD

The web's best fishing magazine

The odd and interesting world of English Carp Fishing

By 4 Comments

I got to do some serious carp fishing in England earlier this month and while we didn’t catch any “golden bonefish,” it was very cool to see a totally new way of doing things.

They do a lot of chumming over there (which is known as “feeding the swim”) with corn, maggots and a whole bunch of other “groundbait.” The way they deliver the chum is prety fun. Here’s my Uncle Neil in action…

Speaking of bait, it appears carp have a bit of a sweet tooth…er…lip based on all the stuff that is used for them. Such as Banana flavored boiles (which are basically dough balls)…

Or how about strawberry flavored corn (I know I probably got all you Kokanee addicts thinking with this one!)…

Though they look like mini crawdad traps, these are actually sinkers (yes they are weighted). The idea here is you stuff them with chum the consistency of packed brown sugar (more on that later) and cast out. The chum concoction starts to leech out of the cage and…hopefully…calls some carp in…

So, what do you stuff into these little cages? Well Uncle Neil mixed up a brew of flavored corn, some chocolatey paste and…yum…live maggots….

Then there’s all the crazy rigs! I’m obviously very at home in a tackle shop, but the carp gear in England is so complicated I could hardly tell what anything was…

Even Coop, who’s an accomplished bobber fisherman, was confused by the massive array of floats…

The preferred rods for carp fishing are very long, often 12 to over 15 in length, and come with an assortment of different tip sections for different methods…

Here’s Uncle Neil with a specialized swing tip, which is supposed to transmit the lightest of bites. I asked him if he wasn’t just pulling my leg and that’s how he really “fixed” a broken tip ?, but he assured me this is factory…

Well the carp didn’t want to play, but Coop and I both added a new species to our lists, the good ol’ yellow perch…

So, without catching a carp, we retreated to the house and caught some TV…

In all seriousness, it was a great time. I’m always down for seeing something new and maybe learning a trick or two. Much love to Uncle Neil for taking us out!

The carp better watch out, next time I’ll have my ground baits, feeders, boilies, pop-ups, controller floats, buzzer bars and ledger rigs ready!

Will these World Record Fish ever be broken?

By Leave a Comment

There are a bunch of world record fish that likely will never be broken.

In some cases records will remain safe due to new regulations. Take for example, Joey “Sturgeon King” Pallotta’s 468-pound white sturgeon that he caught out of Benicia, CA back in July of 1983. Since then, fishing regulations governing sturgeon up and down the West Coast include maximum size limits to ensure the big spawner females don’t get taken out of the gene pool.

In other cases, habitat degradation, development, pollution and over-harvest have all but wiped out the ability of some species to reach record class sizes anymore.

From monster great white sharks to Tuna the size of small cars and brook trout as long as your leg, here’s Field & Stream’s list of 15 (most likely) Unbreakable World Records.