05-02-2012, 05:13 AM
There are lots of places to get into them right now. The Jordan and Utah Lake are great, but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun just poking around the valley at any old ditch or pond that I can find. If the water is dirty, I will stop and watch it until I see some sort of fish activity. If I don't see anything within 20 minutes or so, I'll be off -- unless it's those damn cooling ponds at UL, I refused to believe that there were no fish in there. My bad. Anyhow, if you just follow the Jordan, you can find lots of ponds and off-chutes that are packed with carp.
As for rigs, I'm surprised at what they will take, which is just about anything. I've caught the majority of them on wooly buggers and glo-bugs, but have taken many with dry fly's including hoppers and ants, all the way down to size 20 griffiths. If they're slurping the surface, you can pretty much put anything in front of them and they'll take it. After I departed company w/ FG today, I noticed someone feeding ducks at a little pond. Don't worry, there were probably 10 carp just inhaling the bread from the surface. Can you say bread fly? I can.
If you can sight cast them, that's the best. Let the fly sink slowly in front of them and watch for them to turn to the fly and or watch for their tail to come up a little (which means they just rooted your fly from the bottom). Occasionally I'll find some aggressive ones that will actually chase down my nymph and smack it ala trout/whitefish. I find that it's usually the juvenile carp, 6 to 12 inches, that are aggressive like that.
Today I would put the glo-bug on first and then drop a very buoyant fly (goddard, for instance) about 18 inches off the bend of the hook. That will keep the glo-bug off the bottom in most still water cases and allowed me to pull it up a little bit to the cruising fish that were slurping the top.
Again, I'm a carp fan. I still can't bring myself to kill them though, which is annoying because I really need some Channel bait.
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As for rigs, I'm surprised at what they will take, which is just about anything. I've caught the majority of them on wooly buggers and glo-bugs, but have taken many with dry fly's including hoppers and ants, all the way down to size 20 griffiths. If they're slurping the surface, you can pretty much put anything in front of them and they'll take it. After I departed company w/ FG today, I noticed someone feeding ducks at a little pond. Don't worry, there were probably 10 carp just inhaling the bread from the surface. Can you say bread fly? I can.
If you can sight cast them, that's the best. Let the fly sink slowly in front of them and watch for them to turn to the fly and or watch for their tail to come up a little (which means they just rooted your fly from the bottom). Occasionally I'll find some aggressive ones that will actually chase down my nymph and smack it ala trout/whitefish. I find that it's usually the juvenile carp, 6 to 12 inches, that are aggressive like that.
Today I would put the glo-bug on first and then drop a very buoyant fly (goddard, for instance) about 18 inches off the bend of the hook. That will keep the glo-bug off the bottom in most still water cases and allowed me to pull it up a little bit to the cruising fish that were slurping the top.
Again, I'm a carp fan. I still can't bring myself to kill them though, which is annoying because I really need some Channel bait.
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