Carp Care – take good care of the carp that you catch !
If you are going to fish for carp (or any other catch and release fish) then you should also learn the skills neccessary for treating them correctly on the bank and use these skills in conjunction with top quality carp care materials whish are now widely available.
Damaged fish are commonplace now on many fisheries and this is entirely down to angling pressure, inappropriate care of the fish, and sue of inadequate or inferior quality materials.
At our French lakes Les Croix and Les Levades we provide high quality equipment alongside a set of guidelines aimed at helping our fishing clients to care for the carp they catch.
The majority of fisheries have a “barbless hooks only” rule. The most damage caused by a hook is when it is removed, and a barbed hook will always cause more damage. When a barbed hook passes through a carp’s mouth and gets caught in the landing net mesh, the damage caused can be terrible when the fish struggles in the net. When you get a barbed hook stuck in your finger, you have to go to hospital to have it removed. These are some of the reasons why barbless hooks are specified at many fisheries.
Think about your hookilnk material. Braided hooklinks are responsible for a lot of the damage that is seen to many carp’s mouths. Some braids are very fine and abrasive, and can actually cut into the mouth of the fish, this happens when the hook is well inside the mouth of the carp, and the braid runs around the corner of the mouth and when under pressure acts like a cheese wire. Coated braids such as Fox coretex, ESP strip-teaze and Nash missing link are safe to use but the coating must not be stripped back from the hook otherwise the effect is the same. Mono and flourocarbon hooklinks are a lot safer.
Shrink tubing over the eye of the hook, which is primarily used to aid in the “flip and turn” process of modern rigs, also has a secondary useful purpose in that it reduces the damage caused by the eye of the hook rubbing inside the mouth of the carp.
Every angler should own and use landing nets, unhooking mats and weigh slings of the highest quality, these items cost a fraction of the total cost of a carp set-up, so there is really no excuse for using inferior quality products. At our French fisheries Les Croix and Les Levades, we provide this equipment free of charge to all anglers and we ask them to use them in the following mannner, which is the correct and most fish friendly procedure.
1. Leave the carp in the water in the landing net whilst the unhooking mat etc is prepared. Our weigh slings fit perfectly inside the unhooking mats, if they are laid out like this ready, this is the best way to start.
2. Wet the sling and mat using the water bucket provided. Zero your scales with the sling wet. Take the fish in the net to the mat and unhook it, then apply medi-carp or similar to the hook wound.
3. Move the carp out of the net and into the weigh sling, at the same time removing the net from the mat. Photograph the fish now. With todays digital cameras, keeping the fish on the bank for extended photography sessions is unneccessary and unacceptable.
4. Zip up the weigh sling, weigh the fish and then return it to the water in the sling, open the exit zip and leave the fish in the water in the sling until it is ready to swim off of its own free will.
The above procedure should take no longer than 3 or 4 minutes. Please look after all the carp you catch in this way so that those fishing after you can also benefit from catching the fish in pristine condition…
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