Carp

Lately my fishing partner and I have been fishing carp in the Mississippi. Last night we landed 5 in a couple of hours, the biggest being a full 30", and missed half a dozen more,with a bonus of sunfish with bluegills to over 8 inches and one hybrid to almost 10. The river has been good to us lately with both large and small mouth bass to close to 20", an occasional pike and nice crappies as well as well as the carp and sunnies, a number of which not only ran between 8 and 10 inches but were wide across the back as well.

Last evening the really interesting sight was an osprey taking a fish off the surface. That is the first osprey I have seen on that stretch of the river. Bald eagles are relatively common there, but not the ospreys.

Carp are fun fish. one 30" on the tackle you use Dutch would be a fine time.

My fishing partner and I are enjoying the carp a whole bunch. We are also taking good largemouths, smallmouths, sunfish and crappies and the occational channel cat and pike at the places we have been fishing carp. Multi-species spots like that are a true treasure.

We have taken several fully 30" carp this summer and almost none under 20" or so. When we get a bite on it gets real exciting.

Carp are one of my favorite to fish for . A little some thing I have learned with carp is caned corn with sugar seams to work a little better then corn with just salt . corn with sugar can be kind hard to find fairway grocery store brand has sugar in it .

It seems to us that carp can get sensitized to particular baits; so it pays to change up formulas from time to time.
At least it is working that way for us this year.

Tried fishing for some carp Sunday and today and they were real spooky the water has been a little to clear even the suckers and red horsebite has been a little slow.

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Originally Posted by Rink

Tried fishing for some carp Sunday and today and they were real spooky the water has been a little to clear even the suckers and red horsebite has been a little slow.

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We have been getting a pretty regular bite. Last evening between 6 and 8:30 I landed 5 between about 22 and 28 inches, all on real freight train type strikes where they hooked themselves on the circle hooks. They are not in the same places they were earlier in the season, though. We doctored up our oatmeal dough balls a bit, too, and that helped, as did a touch of GULP Alive juice worked into them.

FWIW we often find carp in proximity to where we find crappies. The fall crappie run on the Mississippi here in the Twin Cities is starting to kick off; so we have been coming to the water rigged for both species and are finding that they seem to trade places from time to time.

I just got back home after a week at the cabin. Lake Superior gave up some lake trout to me but the salmon are still late to show up. Man, the extended winter and cool summer has put that puddle in a tail spin. When the wind allowed the boat out, I fished with some friends and trolling was a long day on the water at best and then of course we had to deal with wind. And lots of it. On Weds we went from a nice, friendly chop to 6 footers in about 20 minutes so we pulled it early. We had one hit in about 5 hours. Marked plenty of nice fish but they had lockjaw. I might run out back and try for some carp just to get the fishing bugs put to rest somewhat.

Just curious what kind of technique you are using while fishing carp that you are picking up bass etc. also? I fish carp sometimes but mostly use sweet corn and have never caught anything else using it!

We have taken cats and even a pike on the dough balls, but I did not mean that we took most of those fish on carp bait, only that we took a variety of types of fish in the same spots where we caught the carp. We normally carry a number of different rigs and if one bite is slow we will switch out.

Crappie fishing with the little plastics is another matter. That will often take carp, and a surprising number of different game fish, some of them well over line weight, very often all on the same bait, especially early in the year.