With the daylight hours rapidly increasing combined with the warmth of the sun, fish activity will be increasing on all lakes. Spring can be hit and miss for carp angling due to the weather and the time it takes the sunlight to penetrate and individual lakes to warm up.

I’ve had some brilliant sessions in March/April for example, but also a few blanks too. It’s well known that on many venues the carp can be found all winter long in the same areas of the lake, however when that sun starts to carry some warmth and daylight hours increase the carp will soon be on the move and searching out the areas of the lake where the sun is at its strongest like the shallows, the West bank margins which receive the morning sunshine after a cold night and island margins in the lee of the wind, for example.

Watercraft
It’s a case of watching the weather and the water because the fish won’t all move to these areas just because the sun pops out, the winter areas will still hold fish right up until May and in some cases on some of the warmer sunny days can be taken on zigs in the upper layers.

I recently had a quick night at my disposal and I fished an 85 acre lake, which has a good stock and a proven cold water record, an ideal winter venue. These days, because my time is far more limited than in previous years I tend to fish for ‘bites’ rather than fishing for a ‘target’ fish. If I had two/three nights a week my angling would be different. I’ve had to adapt and change my approach to suit this type of fishing but it’s another dimension to carp angling and I enjoy it.

The weather wasn’t great for carp angling with an easterly wind blowing and a heavy frost forecast. I don’t get to pick my days to go fishing, I have to fit around work and family commitments so when I get to go, I just go in any conditions and pull out all the stops to try and make it happen even when conditions are poor.

With little showing and nothing to go on I decided to fish a well-known winter zone due to the forecast. The sun did come out to play but it didn’t have much warmth behind it and along with the poor forecast I discounted the shallows. The swim itself gave a lot of water to cover, so I spread my three rods out over different areas and depths to try and search the fish out.

Rigs
I went with the same rigs and bait on all three rods. The main line I have been using for a while now is Gardner Pro XM light blend, which I absolutely adore. It’s strong, supple, limp, casts extremely well for a thicker diameter line and will also sink. It’s basically the best all round line I’ve used in 25 years of carp angling, it’s that good! As leadcore being banned on so many lakes now I have got to grips with the fairly new Camflex lead-free leader material from Gardner. This stuff is as supple as it gets and will truly follow the contours of a lake bed when fished with a slack or a semi slack line, which is how I was fishing on this session. On the end of the Camflex leader I opted for a standard lead clip set up and Kwik Lok swivels, so I could quickly change hook links or swap to zigs in literally seconds. Hook links were constructed using the new Ultra Skin coated hooklink. This is certainly the best supple coated braid I’ve used. If I want a stiff coated braid then I’ll use something like Gardner Sly Skin. On this session I was fishing over silt, so a more supple coated link was preferred. I constructed the hook links as simply as possible by removing a small section of the coating to form just the hair. I then do a 9 turn knotless knot on to a size 8 Covert Mugga hook. Around 10mm above the eye of the hook I break the coating and strip it back around 5mm. This leaves a stiffer section right above the eye to aid turning and a short supple section above that to aid movement. The rig is tangle free and I’ve yet to have a tangle using it, not one! I use this set up sometimes as a single hook bait and sometimes fished in conjunction with a PVA stick. It depends on the depth of water, the range I’m fishing and how ravenous the bream are!

Quick Night
On this short session I was fishing at 70-80 yards range in around 12 feet of water and even though the sun wasn’t carrying much in the way of warmth I knew the light would still penetrate down through the layers in the gin clear water and I was counting on this to get the fish moving and I was confident of a quick daytime bite.

Bait
I opted to use the PVA sticks as a starting point, to test the water so to speak. I made the sticks using a variety of Mainline’s stick mixes including Cell, Hemp, Tiger Nut and the brilliant Cloud9. I also add a variety of liquids to the stick mixes including Hemp Oil, Condensed Coconut Milk Syrup, MultiStim and Cell Hook Bait Dip. The liquids cannot be overloaded and I normally make a wet mix around a week before I’m fishing so when the fishing day arrives the mix has dried into a nice fluffy texture which oozes attraction and makes a large spread around the hook bait rapidly.

I don’t go fishing without The Cell, it’s been a bait I have used for many years starting around two years prior to its release. It’s an amazing bait which I have total faith in. I know it’s horses for courses and other anglers will have as much faith in other baits, but for me it’s Cell. More recently I’ve been mixing it 50/50 with Hybrid and using these two baits in different sizes as my free offerings and then using an alternative hook bait over the top. I’m a great believer in using bright hook baits in the spring when the fish are waking up. I’m told their eyesight improves as the water sees an increase in temperature and with this the fish will be moving and seeking out food. Bright attractive hook baits allow them to home in on an easy morsel of food. As the year goes on when kilos and kilos of boilies have been introduced then the fish can spook off bright ones and this is when dull coloured hook baits with the odd fleck of colour seem to work best, but certainly from my experience bright ones work best during the early part of the year.

On this particular session I decided to incorporate the Essential IB High Impact readymade boilies. I wanted to spread around 40 over each rod and over a fairly wide area. The IB’s are a lovely yellow colour and I wanted the fish to firstly be attracted to the area with the colour and then actively looking for other yellow baits as they picked up the individual IB’s between the Cell/Hybrid freebies. I should point out that the reservoir I was fishing was crystal clear. I used the IB wafters soaked in the hook bait dip as hook baits along with the potent PVA sticks. I thought this would be a good plan of attack and give me the best chance of putting a carp on the bank.

I had the rods out by lunchtime and by 4pm I’d had a couple of fish from two different rods but then as the evening arrived the temperatures plummeted and although a bite was still possible it was a quiet night, just as I thought it would be.

Summary
The sun is a powerful carp attractor especially at this time of the year. Similar to low pressure systems and how they get the fish moving and feeding at any time of the year, at this time of year as the daylight increases and the warmth of the sun kicks in, us carp anglers can take full advantage around how the spring sun affects our quarries movement and feeding habits.