Carp Detective Skills
Carpin’ is a lot like police work, examining the evidence, using your deductive reasoning, making guesses, getting things wrong along the way, and hopefully coming to some reasonable conclusions at the end. The stakes may not be life or death, but they can certainly feel like it when the rewards are a golden ghost you’ve been visualizing in your dreams for months.
This is what happens when you chase carp on the fly for too long.
When carp are tailing, the detective work is a little bit more concrete, more obvious, a bit more sane. You’re looking for clues to lead you to the fish. The first thing you generally see at a flat, if you’re not seeing the fish, is these “dimples” in the ground, which are depressions the carp leave behind after rooting around in the mud. If you’re ever exploring new waters for carp, finding these dimples means you’ve found a feeding ground, a grazing area that the carp will utilize or have utilized. The next piece of the puzzle is figuring out when they feed on those grazing areas, but it is always good to know where they at least have been feeding, chances are the fish will be somewhere nearby.
Carp “dimples” litter the bottom of productive flats
Another thing I’ll look at when I’m looking for fish on the flats is water clarity. Areas where carp are feeding heavily on muddier bottom will have dirtier water, just due to the fact that the feeding of the carp will kick up the mud as they are rooting around. If you can get a high vantage point, often you’ll be able to spot these color differences on a flat, which can help you key in on where they are actively feeding.
Color differences can also help you determine the temperature differences on a flat, especially early season. Clear water and light bottoms don’t hold heat as well as a slightly murkier water and darker bottom. In the early and late season, when you’re looking for the warmest water possible, as that’s also what the fish are looking for, something as simple as just looking at the water clarity and the color of the bottom can help you immensely in narrowing down your search.
Speaking of temperature differences, especially early and late in the flats season, wind is a crucial factor. The wind created surface currents will carry warmer water into some flats, and cool down others. You want to find flats that are on the windward side of the lake, where the wind is blowing the warmer water to your flat, and hopefully keeping it there as well. Flats that have some structure to keep that warmer water in the area will fish the best during windy days. Make the wind your friend, not your enemy, often by trying to escape the wind, you also lose the fish. Embrace the wind, find the carp.
For fish feeding in the surface film, which in my area is largely a winter time occurance, but does happen year round in the mornings and evenings, the wind is the number one factor in finding these gorgeous golden swimming animals. Finding a connection with the wind is like finding a good informant when busting a serial killer, or so I’m told by detectives around the world.
Wind is your best friend, in terms of concentrating the fish in certain areas. Surface food gets pushed into “windrows”, which are slick lines that are formed in the surface of lakes when the wind blows. Carp will group up on these areas like they’re buffet lines, and once you find these slick lines, follow them until you find the fish. They’re a literal trail of breadcrumbs that lead you to gold. What is not to love about that?
Mirror slick lines, or “windrows”, are buffet lines for surface feeding carp.
There’s even detective work used in spotting these golden nuggets of goodness. Listen to your gut, and proceed as if everything were a carp until proven otherwise. And when I say listen to your gut, just let your eyes see everything, don’t set out to look specifically for a carp, just look for anything different. A lot of the time, especially in extreme wind and rough waves, I just see a little hint of a carp, a little slice of heaven lifting up through the waves that made me look twice. Be patient, and watch that little slice turn into a full carp, showing you where he’s heading, what he’s eating and giving you the pieces needed to catch him, it’s just up to you at that point to listen to what he’s telling you and put it into practice.
It takes a true detective to find where this carp hides.
If any of this ramble made any sense, then you just might be cut out for chasing these slurping golden babies on the fly. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together is a big part of the fun in chasing carp on the fly. It’s a visual and thrilling chase, and often filled with long periods of hunting the fish, reading the clues left behind, and the clues the environment they live in offer to you.