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| My biggest carp in the nationwide Spring Big 4 Tournament weighed 38 lbs., 2 oz. My four fish total was 135 lbs., good for 3rd place overrall. |
As many of you know, I fish a lot in freshwater for giant carp. In the last three months, I have been involved in a major nationwide carp fishing tournament sponsored by the Carp Anglers Group. This event, called the Spring Big 4, featured 75 of the best carp fishermen in the US. The idea was to catch and enter your four biggest carp in that time period from March 15 to June 15. My four biggest were all fish over 30 lbs., a difficult thing to achieve here in New England. The exact weights of my entries were 38/2, 34/8, 32, and 30/6 for a total of 135 lbs. I ended up in 3rd place overall, the best finish by a New England carp fisherman this year.
I took a page from my striper playbook and used this idea to land two of those fish over 30 lbs. We all know that large plugs tend to catch large stripers (just think about the Canal). So, halfway through the tournament, I began to use large boilies from Carp Maxx. For those who don't know what a boilie is, they are large commercially prepared scented baits. The ones I were using were 24 mm across. That did the trick as many of the post spawn carp were hungry and looking for that bigger offering. In the last two weeks of the event, I used boilies to land over a dozen carp over 20 lbs. and two carp over 30 lbs.
For those who have never fished for carp, you might be surprised to find they have a lot in common with stripers. They are big, hard fighting fish, they are advantageous feeders who love to feed on lousy, stormy days, they will seek the cover of structure, dropoffs and moving water, and the biggest ones are wary and hard to catch at times.
