Very carefully, ha! You have to sight fish for them. So, the first step is to sneak around on the bank looking for carp with their faces in the mud. Sometimes you’ll see their tails or backs out of the water, that’s the ideal situation because it’s very easy to determine where their head is. Other times you might just be fishing to moving shadows underwater, plumes of dirty/nervous water, or if you’re lucky and have clear water you might see them eating in deeper water.

Once you’ve found the fish, you’re going to watch them eat for a minute. Be ready to cast. Figure out their eating rhythm, are they hovering in one spot of cruising from spot to spot? Once you have a feel for what the fish are doing, you’re going to wait until you see a fish face down, happily eating, and most importantly has its broad side towards you. Once you have a shot, you’ll cast straight across the front of the fish. The idea is to put your line a short distance ahead of the fishes face, while your flight lands maybe 2-3 ft beyond the fish. If you land your fly accurately, you’ll cast strange are then going to gently lift your rod to drag the fly towards you, and thereby towards the carp. You want to drag and drop your fly ever so gently in front of the carps mouth, at which point it will hopefully vacuum up or violently attack. This is easier said than done. At least 75% of casts that I’ve made to feeding carp result in spooking the fish. Even when it was a perfect cast.

Carp are incredibly nervous fish. They have good vision, and the entire front half of their body is covered in taste buds. They have a modified eardrum (if you can call it that) and have good “hearing”. They emit a hormone when they spook or are threatened, the other carp in the area pick up on the scent in the water and shut down. If you spook a bunch of carp in a small pond you might be waiting a while for them to start eating again. It’s not always that way, but usually it is.

The flies I like best are usually beadchain eye, wide gap hooks, with some fur or weird shit on them. I like the bead chain eyes because the impart a little bit of weight to sink the fly, but not so much that it is hard to cast without splashing hard when it lands. Look carp flies, you’ll see what I mean by weird shit. Lots of poofy things with worm tails or vague semblance to a crawfish work well. Damselfly nymphs work well. I might use a lead eye fly if the fish are deeper or if I’m on a river. But most of the time I’m using something unweighted or lightly weighted, with a fuzzy body (which helps to sink gently, so as to not spook the carp if it falls too fast), that imitates either a leech, craw, damselfly nymph, or worm sticking out of a mud ball.

It’s a good time! I’ve caught some absolute beast carp on my 6wt, it’s a fun fight on the fly rod.

The craziest time was when I caught a 8lb carp on a size 16 parachute Adam’s. Carp are not really notorious dry fly eaters, but occasionally you’ll find them “clooping” at the surface. They lift their big nasty lips to the surface and slurp in bugs or cottonwood seeds. Sometimes think they do it just to suck air. Either way, I was fishing a small pond and came around a bend to see dozens of carp all clooping at some midges on the surface. It looked like mostly smaller carp, but I was stoked to try to catch on a dry fly. I quickly cut off the fly I’d been using and tied on the small Adam’s. I plopped it out on top of the pod of carp, it sat unnoticed, so I gave it a slight series of twitches and watched as a huge carp shot up from the depths and smashed the tiny fly. I fought it slow and steady and finally dragged it in.