A Day of Learning

Thursday, August 01, 2013 Carp , Fly Fishing , Kansas 4 Comments

You never stop learning as an angler. No matter how many days on the water, no matter how many fish you may have caught, you will always be a student of fishing. Today was one of the days where I learned a lot. The fish were aggressive but that helped me all the more because it gave me plenty of opportunities to make mistakes on the normally wary carp. To begin I have been experimenting with various hopper dropper rigs to present to cruising carp. I have had a lot of success thus far but today I decided to try droppers with circle hooks. I had upwards of 8 takes, not one single hook set. Now I have used before and love circle hooks so I know how to set correctly, but these fish were spitting fast. I am not sure if it was the additional metal in the bend of the hook was too large, but needless to say this approach did not work. Secondly, I had 4 fish go for the hopper, again with no hookups. I was using an awfully large hopper to support the dropper rig I had set up. I think it was just too big for these guys. None were monsters. I switched to a olive/brown wooly bugger. Hooked into four, had three straighten me out. The only one I landed was the little guy pictured above. First I feel lucky to have at least had that many takes in one afternoon. Regardless of the results, it was exciting. Secondly, I think I am going back to normal hooks on my dropper rigs, third I obviously need to beef up the hooks I use on my wooly buggers, and finally, and this is something I hardly ever suffer from. Don't limit yourself on the water to only a small selection of flies. Had I had some other options, today could have been amazing. The results were all my own doing, had I been better prepared I could have had an amazing day, with easily upwards of 10 fish landed. It would have been my best day for carp to date. Instead I learned a few things. I will still take it.