Q1. I’m fishing a lake which has a big mirror which only gets caught a few times a year. As far as I can tell there is no pattern to it’s captures, eg place, type of bait or time of year. The lake is about eight acres with an island and plenty of marginal snags. There’s lots of smaller carp and I catch regularly, but is there anything you can suggest that would increase my chances of catching the big mirror rather than just hoping it comes along eventually?
Scott Lloyd - Targeting specific carp can be a tricky prospect, especially with a high stock of other fish to contend with. The way I would go about it is to use your eyes! At some point that fish will be visible, and you can start to build a picture of where it likes to be at certain times of day. Even on the mighty Burghfield, I managed to regularly track down the Common. If that’s possible then on somewhere much smaller it would be much easier.
I also feel like there will be some sort of pattern that potentially has been missed before, as it isn’t obvious. Big carp are creatures of habit and as such follow a routine. Sometimes you just have to delve really deep into it to find out the real goings on in their fishy brains.
The only other way I can suggest is using a big fish method. Big boilies with a big, very obvious hinge stiff rig. Smaller carp tend to figure out tall set-ups like this very easily, whereas the larger fish are much less aware of them because of how big they are in comparison to the pop-up section.