If you want to get looked at like a crazy person, go fly fishing for carp. For the majority of people in this country (and the majority of anglers), fly fishing for carp is either something they’ve never heard of or something they actively despise. For the funky few of us who chase these golden beauties regularly, carp have occupied a place in our hearts along with big brown trout or trophy Atlantic salmon — the golden top to the beautiful pyramid that is a life of pursuing fish on the fly.
The early spring can provide some of the most exciting fly angling for carp during the entire year. As the weather warms and fish start to inch their way onto the shallow flats of the reservoirs of California, the opportunities to sight fish for these strong and smart goldens get better and better. But as great as early spring is, it’s not always as simple as showing up at your favorite flat and starting to cast at tailing fish. To get a carp to eat your fly during this season, you need to be aware of how cold fronts, warming trends, and rain events change carp behavior. Early spring weather in California can vary greatly, and being able to adjust your approach and technique to each day is essential. One day you might show up at your favorite flat and find it full of tailing fish, while the next, they’ll be suspended over a hundred feet of water and feeding on algae clumps on the surface.
One of the best aspects of hunting carp in the early season is seeing big fish coming in shallow. In the deep reservoirs of California’s valleys, the largest carp often spend most of the year in deeper water. During the early spring, however, a lot of these bigger, 20-plus-pound fish come into really shallow water to feed and get ready for spawning, giving fly fishers a good shot at landing one of these brutes, fish that otherwise remain hidden. Use this time of year well, and you might just catch the largest fish of your life.
Where to Find Early Season Carp
To catch carp on the fly, you usually need to see them. Blind casting and catching carp is kind of like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Besides, one of the most exciting aspects of fly fishing for carp is the sensory aspect of it all, particularly the way your heart races right before the fish takes or rejects your offering. But to experience this, you need to put the fly right in front of them. Rarely do you see a carp chase a fly to eat it. To find carp that are catchable on the fly, you’ll first have to learn how to distinguish between feeding carp and carp that aren’t feeding. If the fish is sitting still in the shallows or hanging motionless in the middle of the water column, it’s a fish I’d leave alone. Food is not on its mind. I’d also leave alone fast-moving fish that are not going to stop to look at anything or feed, either. Casting to fish that aren’t actively feeding will spook them, or worse, spook other fish nearby that might be feeding. Instead, the fish you want to try to find are the fish that are actively rooting around in the mud, or rising to something on the surface (also called “clooping”), or slowly cruising around, then stopping and opening their mouths to feed on something.
Where do you find these golden beauties? In the early spring, when the water is cool, I tend to find carp cruising around deep creek arms, often in the hundreds. In my part of California, the Central Coast, in February, I start to focus on fish feeding on top, on midges and even small mayflies. These fish can be a lot of fun, and since these creek channels are often surrounded by high banks, you can spot the groups of fish from high ground and plan your approach. This is when long casts matter, whereas in most carp fly fishing, you’ll want to make short casts to avoid spooking other fish.
When carp are feeding on bugs on top, rising like trout to a hatch, you’ll see their mouths come clean out of the water, making it easier to see them take the fly from a long distance away. Casts of 70 to 100 feet are not uncommon, which is not to say that they are necessary, but being able to make longer casts allows you to present the fly to a greater number of fish. Keep in mind, though, that just because you’re able to make longer casts, doesn’t mean you always should, especially if there are fish feeding closer to you. Read the situation and always target the fish feeding closer to you first — casting over them and targeting fish farther away is a lose-lose situation. We want to catch these fish, not spook them. Priorities are important when carp fishing.
When there have been a few nights in a row over 40 degrees, you can start looking for carp moving onto the flats, tailing in the shallows. I first start looking at the flats close to deep water, often right outside the creek arms that hold fish during the colder months. Logically, you’d think they would keep to the deeper edges of the flats to begin with, but I’ve found that once they make the move onto the flats, they start scouring for food in just inches of water right away. What can bring carp into shallow water faster, though, is when big rain events come through and raise the water level quickly, flooding previously dry land that is often populated with insects and plants. In this situation, carp love to come into the shallows to feed, even when cold fronts have passed through and the weather has cooled.
At times like these, look for fish on flats close to the inlets of these reservoirs. Whether it’s from snowmelt or rain events, the fish will push through the colder water to access prime feeding grounds. The fish will still be spooky, despite the muddied water, but the good news is that if you find fish feeding in flooded brush, often they make so much noise while rooting around in the dry sticks that you can get really close to them and see what they are doing and where they are moving. This allows you to make a presentation to the fish and still see them take the fly, even if there is just inches of visibility.
Flats will be home to carp throughout the season once they start foraging in them around mid-March through mid-April. Wind becomes an important factor in deciding which flats to fish, because it spreads the warmth found in the upper layer of water. Flats that are on the downwind side of the shoreline will have warmer water, and wave action will root up food items from the bottom and hold more suspending algae and plankton, which both carp and the insects carp love to eat will be feasting on. A good tip in almost all fishing: a thermometer can be very useful in the early season, because you can check the temperature changes between areas of the lake and use it to decide where to fish, depending on the effect of the wind. The change in temperature between areas of a lake can be drastic — two to five degrees makes a huge difference, and carp generally look for the warmest water, especially early in the year.
Once the weather properly warms up, I find in my area that carp start lining up on gravel bars, looking for clams and small crayfish. Usually this begins from around mid-April to the beginning of May, depending on the weather, and it will last well through June and July. These fish are easy to spot, because they’re often lined up along the bank facing in toward the shoreline and will even occasionally lift their heads out of the water and slurp something off the dry rocks, as if they’re feeding on insects on the bank. I’ve never caught one while they’re slurping off dry land — it’s a presentation that is more difficult than it might appear — but it is cool to witness and to hear. When these fish are facing straight in toward the bank, it can be hard to present the fly to them, because there’s very little space between the fish and the bank. But if you are patient and watch the fish for awhile, they will move between spots along the gravel, and when they move, you can anticipate their path and present the fly in front of them.
How to Target Early Season Carp
When you find fish feeding in the deeper channels and lake arms in the colder months, it makes for a unique carp-fishing experience. As I said, long casts and surface flies are the ticket, and it can be very useful to have a helper (or guide) positioned higher up than the angler, someone who’s able to spot fish and direct where to cast. Look for pods of fish, preferably 4 to 10 fish at a time. Any more and you might have a hard time picking a target. You want to be able to spot a specific fish and cast to that fish. Leading a group of carp hoping just one of them might notice your fly and follow is a losing proposition — these aren’t tarpon or bonefish, and your accuracy needs to be spot on. A second person helping spot fish can pick out fish that are actively feeding, which helps, because you will see groups of fish swimming 50 or more feet from you, but determining whether they are indeed feeding can be hard when you are down on the water, making the casts. Someone higher up can get a clearer picture of what the fish are doing — whether they are opening their mouths as they’re cruising or keeping them closed, for example. Generally, fish cruising in a straightish line with their mouths closed are not players, and you should just avoid casting to them. But fish that are cruising a bit slower, moving side to side every now and then and opening and closing their mouths, are fish you should be targeting.
With regard to flies, you don’t need to go intensely imitative. Just match the general shape and action of what the fish are feeding on. If you see the fish breaking the surface to feed, you’ll want a dry fly. If there’s a lot of floating algae around, that’s probably what they’re feeding on, so something “blobby,” wide, and fluffy is generally what I’ll cast. Color isn’t hugely important, so make it something you can see. When it’s still pretty cold and there’s still not much algae in the water, carp may focus on midges in the surface film. When I first saw this, I did what any good trout angler would do and tied on flies from size 18 to 24. The results shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen a gorilla break a twig — hooks in that size don’t hold carp larger than a pound. I now tie flies the size of small midges on size 8 to 10 heavy-wire hooks that can handle the brute strength of the golden ghost.
Leaders for this kind of fishing don’t need to be overly complicated, either. I taper my leaders down to 3X when the water is really clear early in the season, then, when the water takes on more color from algae and debris, I bump up to 2X. Leaders 10 to 14 feet long are perfect for fish feeding in the surface film and for those longer casts. As for rod sizes, I wouldn’t go heavier than an 8-weight or lighter than a 6-weight. I prefer a 6-weight for surface-feeding fish, because I like the way that it lays down the line softly on those longer casts. But if you’re using a heavier rod, just dial back a bit on the power as you make your final presentation to avoid splashing the line down. I like to use a clear fly line for these situations, but it’s not necessary — any weight-forward line with a longer front taper will work well.
For fish coming up into the shallows on the flats and gravel bars, it’s all about stealth and shorter casts. These fish are feeding largely on the bottom, so finding actively feeding fish is a bit more obvious than when they are cruising around. Generally, if they are feeding, you will see them root up mud on silty bottoms, or they will have their tails up, waving around, while their heads are down, eating off the bottom.
Getting close to these fish is important. In most California lakes and reservoirs, carp won’t aggressively attack flies, so you need to be close enough to see when they eat your fly, otherwise, you’ll miss the subtle take. Wear drab clothing that matches the background. If you’re close to the tree line or along cliffs, wear browns and tans. If you’re in open water and there’s nothing behind you but open sky, wear shades of blue to match. Whatever you wear, however, make sure you move slowly. And when I say slowly, I mean extremely slowly. You can get very close to carp as long as you move slowly and avoid making noise. Look at your footing and make sure you’re not stepping on branches, loose rocks, or empty beer cans.
Carp in the shallows of most reservoirs in California will be feeding on clams, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, leeches, worms, and crayfish. You can figure out which of these the fish are focused on based on the habitat they’re feeding in and how they’re hunting their food. Clams and worms are often found along silty bottoms with not a lot of vegetation around. A good fly to start with in these conditions is John Montana’s Hybrid, a fly made to imitate both worms and clams. It has a clamlike body, but a tail of red chenille, something that can pass as a worm and a clam feeding tube. Fish feeding on clams and worms move slowly, rooting around for awhile in one spot before moving on to another. When you present these imitations, use what’s referred to as a “drag-and-drop” technique, where you cast past your target, drag the fly into the path of a feeding carp, and drop it right in front of it. This imitates how clams flee when danger approaches. They’ll come up and put their feeding tubes out to filter food items, then, when danger approaches, they dart back down into the sand, much like a weighted fly plunging down in front of a feeding carp.
If you find fish feeding in flooded vegetation or around aquatic vegetation, there’s a good chance they’re feeding on aquatic nymphs or leeches. These are food items that actually move a bit, so when you present the fly to the carp, you can retrieve it slowly. Dragonfly and damselfly nymphs are commonly on the menu for carp feeding around vegetation, and any lightly weighted or unweighted (depending on depth) fly in olive or light green will work in sizes 4 to 12. The best presentation for these is to cast past the path of a feeding carp, similar to a drag-and-drop presentation, but instead of dragging it to the carp and then dropping it, let the fly sink near or to the bottom before slowly stripping it into the feeding path of the carp. This is also a helpful presentation in muddier waters, where you might have a hard time seeing the take. The fact that you can actually move the fly will help you feel a take. Just be careful not to strike blindly at anything you feel, because you might foul hook the fish. Pay attention to where the carp’s head is and to its body language — both can help you detect the take. Carp generally turn their body slightly as they feed on something, so if you can see that and feel the take, a strip set is a good option. That way, if you miss the take, you don’t spook the fish by pulling the line violently up through the water.
The gear I use for carp in the shallows is pretty much identical to what I use for the surface-feeding fish in deeper waters, but you can get away with a shorter leader, since your casts are shorter and you’re generally not laying down a lot of line before reaching a fish. If you’ve been stealthy and gotten close to a carp, most of your casts will be 10 to 20 feet long, and a shorter leader helps make accurate presentations at that distance. A leader of 9 to 10 feet is good for 90 percent of the situations you’ll encounter in the shallows. I generally don’t go much lighter than 2X on the flats, because many shallow areas in our reservoirs have brush, rocks, sunken trees, and other debris that will break your tippet easily. If you’re in murky water, you can get away with a heavier leader than you would otherwise. Using a loop knot such as the Nonslip Mono Loop is helpful in making your flies move naturally, even when using a heavier tippet.
Take the Plunge
The spring is the best time of year to chase carp, because you can find them in all sorts of locations and behaving in all kinds of ways throughout the lakes and reservoirs of California. You have shots at big fish and at numbers of fish, can fish dry flies, and can target tailing fish on the flats. The weather is generally very nice, and as long as the beer is cold, you really can’t have a bad day. If you’ve never taken the plunge into the fanatical and twisted world of carp fly fishing, this is the time to try it. These are fish that will test all of your angling prowess and can finally show you what all that backing hidden under your fly line is for. And if you’re headed on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to saltwater flats, carp will certainly help you finesse your flats-fishing game. They’ll probably be even tougher to catch than anything you’ll encounter in the exotic locales you are headed to — yes, even tougher than permit. So if you hold ancient notions of carp being “trash fish” or an ecological nuisance, you might want to reconsider your attitude. Carp are close to being the perfect game fish. They might even help you become a perfect angler — someone who is comfortable with defeat and who learns from each outing.
