Dear Ian Russell,
I am due to fish a 48-hour charity carp-fishing match on a local water soon. I have never really fished prolific venues in the past, opting to sit it out for the bigger specimens on low-stock waters. Could you please give me a few pointers on how I can keep catching consistently throughout the course of the event and, hopefully, win!
James Goodyear, Cheshire

Well James mate, this is an excellent question, as this is a situation, which you may or may not know, I have found myself in on many occasions. Firstly, accept the fact that you are swim building in the hope that you will be catching a great many fish. Never accept the fact that it’s only odd fish that you’ll be catching. Let’s assume you have plumbed the swim and found an acceptable area to fish over, this could be a gravel plateau or a nice stinky silt bed. What you need to do is to prepare this chosen area with a nice bed of bait, this usually being made up of pellets, hemp, sweetcorn, maggots and small boilies. To start with both rods should be roving rods and you should keep a close eye on the baited area, for as we all know carp are amongst the most visual of coarse fish so it will be very obvious when they have arrived for a munch up. Waiting for this to happen on some venues may take some time, so until it does you can try and fish one rod long beyond the baited area, because you should start to get line bites when they turn up and start feeding on your baited area. As soon as this occurs, immediately drop a bait onto the area of feeding.

I would be confident using any of the small pop-ups from my own Heathrow Bait Services’ range.

The other rod would be fished to any showing carp, however if none are seen it would be fished to any visual features such as islands, pads, snags, or overhanging trees, as these are all known fish-holding spots. At the rig end of the rods I would use the smallest bait I can get away with, such as any 12mm pop-up from my own Heathrow Bait Services’ range to which I would attach a small bag of halibut pellets, which I have found to be the most attractive available. Rig-wise I would use a short, coated hooklink with a super stay-sharp C2 Prologic hook attached. These little beauties will allow you to catch many fish on the same rig. So time is saved, as you don’t spend half the day changing rigs.

Another thing that I would definitely do is to attach marker knots on the rod that was being fished to the baited area, again to save time on accurately recasting. Now let’s assume the fish have arrived and are feeding on the baited area, you have mega-sharp re-usable rigs, marker knots for accuracy, and you are catching fish. When do you endeavour to top up the baited area without being frightened of spooking the feeding fish? My way of dealing with this is to use the smallest spod/pocket rocket available and as soon as takes start to slow down, stick out a dozen rockets onto the baited area. On most lakes that are prolific this is an acceptable way of keeping the swim topped up and usually won’t spook the fish.

Hope you find this helpful and it answers your question.

Kind regards,
Ian Russell