Thread: Once again not a crappie.

Carp are really overlooked by sports fishermen but I will never forget the first time I snagged one with a beetlespin.....I thought I had a 12lbs bass on. Turned out to be a 3-5lbs carp.

In the James river in Va, I would always see these 30-50lbs class fish rolling on top of the water and finally stumbled across a guy that was actually targeting them. He would "bait" the area by throwing a handfull of corn out into the water and then lace a few kernels on a hook and throw it in the center. I copied that idea a while later and was pretty amazed to catch a few like that. Very good fighters - they make some strong runs when hooked.

There's nothing at all wrong with sitting back in the shade and wrestling carp, especially if more preffered scaled buddies play hard to get. On light tackle they can be an awesone fish to catch.

We were out for carp again this evening.

The instant oatmeal dough ball had worked so well that the two of us went through almost a whole can in the last three evenings. We also found out that a pair of latex or light nitrile gloves makes it a lot easier to do up the bait. You can make them a little softer, which seemed to produce a better bite. We have never fought so many large fish in such a short period of time, and we had quite a number of good hard freight train strikes, one of which almost cost my fishing buddy his rod. I suppose that in 15 manhours of fishing we landed well over 2 dozen carp with about a quarter of them close to or over 10 pounds each and nothing under maybe three pounds. We have had a ball this week with these fish.

This evening there was too much breeze for the light jigs to hold with any kind of slack, which you cannot avoid with the light weights we were using anyway; so we changed to a drop shot rig of a size 4 octopus circle hook above about 1/8 oz. Once we remembered you do not set the hook with the circles we started connecting pretty regular. We ended the evening with a double. Mine I just couldn't hold on the 8 pound line; so my buddy ended up netting his by himself.

I am amazed that the dough balls hold up well to bait stealers. Most of our fish this evening would nibble at it a while before really taking the bait; so those oatmeal dough balls stood up a whole lot better than I would have guessed a week ago.

Crappies are still my darling, but it is pretty hard to beat the sport in carp fishing when they are biting like they have been for us, especially on medium weight spinning tackle. I had dug out an older medium weight steelhead rod and it had all it could handle on several of my fish while still being able to cast the light weights we were using very well.

A lot of guys use canned corn for carp, but it is pretty hard for me to think it is better than the instant oatmeal, and you can carry over the left over oatmeal in the trunk without worrying about leaks.

BTW we take carp pretty regularly early in the season on crappie plastics, too. Those fish got shoulders and on ultralight with 4# test line your drag gets a real work out. For pure sport it is pretty hard to beat an old carp.

Do you erect little monuments for all those carp you caught, and then buried, per mn. Fishing regs? Or do you keep and smoke them? No, not in your pipe.

Fun! Z would love to get in on the carp. I may have to pick up some oatmeal mix tonight and go looking for them.

I took him out in the canoe later yesterday evening after a busy day. When you put on the lake at 7:45pm now days, there isn't much time after the paddling is done, since I haven't rigged up any lights. Smaller ones were near the surface and shallow. Larger ones were deeper off the main weed break.

We haven't tried the oatmeal for lake carp yet, although we see some very big ones in a number of local lakes. So far about all we have targeted are carp in water with no current in some places on the river. There is a definite possibility of z tagging carp large enough to spool his spincast reel. The last one I caught last evening took off on a run that probably went 40 yards right off the bat, and the bait was out a good bit to begin with. That was on 8 pound line with the spinning reel drag tightened down about as far as I dared, not one of my ultralight spinning reels either. You get into a real good one and you have a tackle buster, if you don't have the capacity to allow those runs.

Looks to me like you and Z are doing all right on the crappies these days. Real nice one in the picture. He is becoming quite the fisherman.

We decided to sneak out a little earlier this evening and give that lake more than an hour. A beautiful evening and Z had a great time with some fair bluegill that were boiling the water surface all around us, and a whole mess of 10.5" class crappies. Second weed edge dropping into deeper, probably 15' clear water.

Where I can reach the outside weedline on some of the docks, I am also finding crappies deep down as far as 20', but am having trouble finding them that size on the docks I have available. The lakes I fish have had fluctuating water levels this year, often bringing some of the deeper breaks into play, and that means different areas from the breaks they use in higher water levels. So hot spots move around some when water levels change.