The Ins and Outs of Trophy Carp Fishing

Allow me to describe your target. It could easily weigh more than 20 pounds, and you probably don’t have to travel far to catch one, wherever you live. You don’t need a boat or a guide. The power and speed of its runs will amaze you. You like a challenge? It’s been proven to run circles around most fish in adaptive behavior. To top it off—and perhaps its most underrated feature—catch one from the right water, and it could be one of the most striking looking fish you’ll ever catch: perfect rows of dark mahogany scales or wildly mismatched golden clusters. 

As you can probably tell by now, I’m a big fan of big carp. Here’s how to find one in a waterway near you. 

GETTING TO KNOW CARP

What we’re talking about here is the common carp and its flashier sibling, the mirror carp (both Cyprinus carpio). They’ve been swimming in American waters for nearly 200 years, yet there is still widespread confusion when identifying them as a species. Once you know what to look for, you’ll realize they’re distinct from native suckers, grass carp, goldfish, and the undesirable newcomers, silver and bighead carp. 

Commons have two barbels (one large, one small) on each side of a fleshy mouth that can protrude and retract to suck in food. They have prominent fins and a long dorsal that begins with a hard spine and has more than 16 soft rays. Large, diamond-shaped scales cover nearly the whole body and are normally some shade of golden brown. 

So-called “mirror carp” are the exact same species, but have a genetic variant that affects their scaling in fascinating ways, from tiny starburst patterns to a complete covering of differently sized scales, and a hundred variations in between. These are perfectly natural, healthy fish. The mutation was engineered by early European carp aquaculturists, who thought it would be quite convenient to raise a fish for the table that required less effort to scale. 

Of course, another distinguishing feature of carp is their size. They grow big and they grow quickly. Dedicated carpers aim for fish weighing in the high 30s to 40s, and the unofficial U.S. record from a modern carp angler is more than 60 pound, but a universal and very achievable goal is a fish weighing more than 20 pounds. 

STEP 1: FIND THE RIGHT WATER

Carp like to sunbathe and drift around in the upper layers during the warmer months, but for bigger fish and more intensive feeding periods, especially in the South, late fall through early spring is the time to go. Cooler water and weather seem to flick a feeding switch and help you avoid turtles, the bane of all U.S. carp anglers, which love nothing more than wrecking carefully presented carp rigs and baits but go into a torpid state over the winter. Carp particularly love wet and windy, low-pressure kinds of days, so keep an eye on the weekly forecast. 

Carp are consummate omnivores and can eke a living in all kinds of environments from small ponds to giant rivers and impoundments, but there are a few ways to shave the angles if your goal is a big fish. Just like chasing trophy bass, think high-quality forage like mussels, clouds of daphnia, and extensive insect hatches. Trophy carp hunter Yuriy Nesterov recently became the first U.S. angler to verifiably notch a 30-, a 40-, and a 50-pounder in a single session, from a small forgotten fishery he deliberately targeted for its abundant forage. 

“I was looking for a neglected lake,” he says, “but also one full of natural food, and this place was absolutely filled with snails, plenty of crayfish, and lots of silt.” One reason carp like silt is it’s often home to huge beds of bloodworm (the larval stage of midge flies). 

While it’s a rule of thumb and doesn’t apply if you’re targeting huge rivers or lakes, the next shortcut to locating big fish is to look for waters that have low or restricted carp recruitment. Lakes with extensive shallow, marshy areas are perfect carp nurseries. For the fish to grow really big, we want a low stock of carp dividing up all that food, so look for waters without comfortable places for carp to spawn or where the stock is low for some artificial reason. This could be as simple as consistent deep margins, a previous fish kill or netting, or clear water and lots of predatory fish to keep juvenile carp numbers pinned to the floor. 

STEP 2: FIND THE FISH

Locating big carp within a waterbody is not really any different than locating any carp, though smaller fish are often quicker to get on a new food source than the bigger specimens. When safe, the big guys will then just move in and bully the little fish out of the way, so it pays to be patient. 

Carp love marginal shelves and a first step might be to use a castable sonar, like a Deeper, or a kayak rigged sonar to locate the shelf. Other areas that can be carp magnets include weed beds, even when they’ve died off in the winter, underwater humps and depressions in the lake bed, the margins of islands, standing timber or snags that extend out into the lake, overhead cover like lily pads or moored boats, and oxygenated areas like river inlets and natural springs, especially in the heat of summer. As with most fish, think security, access to food, and comfort. 

Though you won’t have the benefit of sonar to pick out shoals of forage fish or even individual fish, at dawn especially, feeding and patrolling carp often jump and crash out of the water—and not quietly. In the right conditions, a leaping carp can be heard from hundreds of yards away. 

If they’re feeding on your spot, one early sign is they’ll sometimes come all the way up from the bottom and porpoise just below or on the surface, then head straight back down. You’ll see a bulge in the water or a flash of dull gold as the fish turns. Get ready to hold on. Other signs can be strings of bubbles that suddenly appear over your bait, discolored water where they’ve been feeding on the bottom, and reeds and lilies being knocked sideways as they move around under the canopy. Good carp anglers are always scanning the water and treat binoculars as essential gear. 

STEP 3: PRESENT THE BAIT

If you’re serious about targeting big carp, there’s definitely a learning curve with the unfamiliar rigs and the stepped-up tackle carp anglers use, but the real rabbit hole is in educating yourself about bait and baiting. It’s a huge topic and often becomes like a side hobby for keen carpers as they experiment with dozens of different flavors, additives, and bases mixed into chum and boilies, the rolled and boiled paste baits that dominate European carp fishing. The original idea behind boilies was that if you constructed a bait that was a complete carp meal in terms of nutrition, carp would recognize it and seek it out before feeding on anything else. The boiling part skins the bait to make it harder for nuisance fish to feed on it. Many carp anglers swear by boilies and often fish them in bigger sizes or doubled up to select bigger fish. 

Colin Peters is recognized as one of the best tournament carp anglers in the country, and he’s lucky to have a rather large test tank in his backyard—North Carolina’s High Rock Lake. For the last three years he’s been running an experiment to see what hookbait pulls in the biggest fish. Boilies have been winning so far, closely followed by tiger nuts (the tubers of yellow nutsedge plants) and maize. Several online carp shops sell both boilies and prepared tigers and maize. 

In terms of flavoring his packbait (the mix of breadcrumbs, oats, or ground-up feed that is molded around the sinker for extra attraction), after endless experimentation, he’s gone back to perhaps the universal carp flavor and attractant: sweetcorn. 

 “A couple of years ago,” he says, “I gathered up all my flavors and threw them in a dumpster. Carp everywhere absolutely love sweetcorn with juice and creamed corn, so why mask those flavors?” 

As a rough guide, and where permitted, serious carp anglers look to pre-bait or chum a spot about three times before they begin fishing in order to give the carp a chance to discover the bait and add that spot to their daily rounds. 

STEP 4: WAIT

When you’ve located a water with high potential, found a likely spot, baited it over a period of time, and then made an accurate cast to that spot, all that’s left to do is wait. Serious trophy carp anglers have levels of patience that border on the psychotic. Yuriy Nesterov fished his small lake for more than a year before he even landed his first fish. But finally laying eyes on that massive specimen after months or years of planning and dreaming, is about as intense as fishing gets. Sean Manning of The American Carp Society still remembers the moment decades ago he slipped the net under a personal best of more than 45 pounds. 

“The shoulders on the fish were truly staggering,” he recalls. “Every second of that moment is embedded in my mind to this day, and the feeling of accomplishment still hasn’t been surpassed years later.” 

Trophy carp fishing can be a lonely business but to help you down the path, the most valuable thing you can do to improve your craft and begin to track down bigger fish is to tap into the small but thriving U.S. carp scene via its two membership groups: The American Carp Society and the Carp Anglers Group. Both have been in operation for years, and within their Facebook pages, online forums, and publications is a treasure trove of information about tackle, rigs, bait, techniques, and hundreds of highly experienced carp anglers to bounce questions off.

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