Cold water carp fishing

Cold water isn't very conducive to fishing for carp. Though I've caught carp early in the spring while there was still ice on the surface, as carp metabolisms slow down for the winter, they get harder to catch once the water temps dip below 50 degrees Farenheit during the fall. As such, I normally put away my carping gear by mid October.

I recently learned of a new spot where the carp were still biting despite the water temp being down to about 40 degrees Farenheit. With a warm, sunny day forecast, I decided to make it out to the new spot, a region I have never fished before.

I took along some frozen corn nibblets, as well as some small boilies I made a while ago. My fishing buddy decided to stick with frozen corn. We finallt hit the spot around 10:00 AM. Met up with some other people that had been fishing for carp there over the past week, they seemed to be on to some fish, most of them smaller than I had ever seen, small 1-2 pound carp. They were float fishing with tiny hooks, pobably #8 or #10, which would probably explain why most of their carp were that size, though they did eventually catch some better 10 lbs+ fish.

My buddy and I both started off fishing with corn. Took him about 1/2 hour to get his first one, a good 12 lbs carp. Nice start to the day. Fishing was very slow after that. After about 2 hours, he hooked one of the baby carp the others had been catching earlier on.

I switch to my home made boilies. Nothing doing for another couple hours, so we moved off to another spot. The new spot wasn't any better, and to make matters worse, the slight current kept fouling my presentation with dying weeds.

With less than 1 hour left to our day, I headed back to the first spot, as it was on our way back to the car. I hooked up 4 corn nibblets, along with a fake pop up corn nibblet I had bought over the summer on my hair rig. Sure enough, I got hit within a couple minutes of my first cast. The carp ran surprisingly fast considering the near freezing water temperature, and put up a nice fight. Finally landed it, noticed a big lamprey stuck to it's back. After a couple quick pics, I released the fish, but stomped the lamprey to death.

Needless to say, we were both thrilled to have landed carp big enough to make the drags sing. The sweet sound of the reel from those few screaming runs and the big bend in my new 9 foot Ugly Stik is the prefect way to end my perfect carp season... Well, maybe just one more outing ...