Fly Fishing For Carp Survey Results: Carpin's Dirty Little Secret

Fly fishing for carp has a dirty little secret. I am willing to share that secret but you gotta promise to keep it between us OK? Actually, I change my mind. Please share the hell out of this because I think it could really help people new to the game gain critical perspective.

The secret is this: It turns out that you don't have to cast very far to catch carp. As matter of fact it turns out you barely need to be able to cast at all - at least in the traditional sense. I bet some of you don't believe me, but that is OK because I come armed with data!

The following graph charts the distances where the 200+ respondents to our recent fly fishing for carp survey catch the most carp. Well over 50 percent of the respondents fly fishing for carp survey catch most of their carp at less than 20 feet. Almost 90 percent of the participants catch most of their carp at less than 40 feet. Most shocking of all perhaps, about 17 percent of them catch most of their carp at dapping range!!!!!

  
The Internet has spent years and years convincing us that only master fly casters can catch carp on the fly.  Well, sorry to disappoint, but at least when it comes to distance it just is not true!  Personally I would actually counter that even trying to catch them at any significant range is usually counter-productive and damaging.

Now, that does not mean that a certain level of skill doesn't help - just that distance has absolutely nothing to do with it!  Getting close and presenting the fly are actually orders of magnitude more important.  Instead of practicing casting a line 80 feet you should first work on mastering your crouching tiger stalking heron. Once you have gotten the hang of getting close you should master several different short range casts and presentations that make a huge difference - some of which can be seen here:

Fly Fishing For Carp Survey Results: Carpin Is HARD

How difficult is fly fishing for carp? Many of us on the front line of the revolution (aka carp slime pushers) have been worried that we are making it sound too hard and discouraging new-comers. Well, according to our recent fly fishing for carp survey we are probably under-stating the situation. This #$## is HARD!  

The first question relating to difficulty in the survey was "What is the most carp you have caught on the fly in one day?" I asked this question because I have personally caught something like 70 trout in an afternoon before. Smallmouth bass too come to think of it. I have never personally caught more than 20 carp in a day though, and I am not going to lie to you, I am a little self-conscious about that. After all, the dude from Fly-Carpin should have had a 20 fish day mixed in there somewhere.

Well, I suspect that many of us in the fly fishing for carp revolution are a little self conscious about it, because a significant majority of the participants have never caught more than 10 carp in a day.

I don't know about you, but I found that a little shocking, and it is not like the survey was full of rookies.  I couldn't figure out a reasonable way to normalize this by years of experience, but a solid majority of the participants have over two years of experience.  

The lesson here is that if you are at all discouraged about your best day of carpin, you probably shouldn't be.  It is just hard to catch allot of carp in a single day.  Really hard.


The next question was "About how many carp have you caught on the fly lifetime? I was able to normalize the responses for this question by years of experience, and I like to think of the resulting curve as the fly fishing for carp learning curve.

According to the survey, carpin requires years of commitment to master. It takes the typical carper 2 years to catch their first 10 carp, and they don't really start to catch allot of carp a year until after year 4 or 5.  

Are you freaking kidding me? That is pretty close to my own experience, and I am not sure I would have stuck with it if I knew then what I knew now because the learning curve is brutal.

The good news is that it does get easier. Much easier. So, if you are in year 1 to 3 and getting discouraged, stick with it! Your progress may seem slow, but that is because carpin is HARD and that is all their is to it.

Fly Fishing For Carp Survey Results: Carp Fly Preferences

In this post I would like to review the results from our fly fishing for carp survey as they relate to carp fly preferences.  You can see the Google auto-generated results from the survey here.

There weren't many earth shattering surprises when it came to preferences on carp flies, and frankly I don't think this post is going to change how any experienced carpers look at their fly box much.  I do think that it will be very helpful for beginners looking for a starting point.

The first question in the survey relating to carp fly preference was favorite size.  I don't think anybody would be surprised to see that size 6 and 8 dominated.  Eighty Percent of the participants favored size 6 or 8!

I was a little surprised, however, that size 14 even made even a modest showing - not because they are not productive, but because it is hard to have faith in such a small fly for such a large fish.  The truth is that every serious carper I know of who has given small size 14 flies a serious try has been successful and one of my personal goals is to explore the lower limit of the size spectrum this winter.

We also asked participants for their favorite carp fly color.  Olive, Rust and Black accounted for over 75% of the participants preferences!  For me, the only real surprise there is that black was so close.  I have only this year really discovered how extremely effective black can be.  I actually responded with olive for this question myself but black has been making a massive push for my top affection all year.

Also note that I lumped all the egg colors together to accentuate the fact that there is a small but VERY passionate sect of the revolution that swears by various egg yarn colors.

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The only other point of interest is that I suspect Red is a little under-rated.  I recently took the time to figure out what percentage of carp I have caught on different colors and Red was right up there. I suspect that with how popular the Hybrid is that these days allot of people are probably treating red as the secondary color in their flies.  I hope so, because I guarantee you that if you don't have some form of red worm in your arsenal you are missing out on what can be at times the most deadly carp weapon.

The final survey question relating to fly preferences asked what the angler's favorite carp fly was and let them fill in the blank.  Survey nightmare!  It turns out that everybody and their brother has their own custom carp fly.  The answers were all over the place!  In the end all I could do was dig through the data and try and find common themes.  The next chart has any flies where I could find a common theme repeated more than three times.  For example: 

• If the participants said "blah blah blah bugger blah blah blah", well I called that a Woolly Bugger. 
• If the participant said "My version of a hybrid", well I grouped that with Montana's Hybrid. 
• If the participant chose different random ways of saying "Un-Named Damsel Fly" that got grouped with "Various Damsel Fly"
• Etc. Etc.

The post-processing on this one was very very manual - and had some subjectivity involved. Additionally almost 50% of the participants couldn't fit into this graph.  Many favor their own unique creation, others quite honestly didn't know yet and so many of the well known named flies only had one or two participants name them that the chart would have been fifty feet wide if I didn't cut if off at 3 or more repeats.  

In other words the data is pretty sketchy, but nevertheless it is clear that Montana's Hybrid, Zimmerman's Backstabber and about a zillion different variants of the venerable Woolly Bugger are very very popular carp flies.  

Egg flies also made a shockingly strong showing....shocking unless you know somebody who consistently kicks your ass with them.  Lookin at you Medina.

So what does this all mean?  Well, like I said, probably not much for experienced guys.  Most anglers with more than a couple of years of experience fly fishing for carp are going to find this interesting and possibly thought provoking but far from earth shattering.  For newer carpers I hope this helps allot.  It certainly would have helped me about 15 years ago.

Fly Fishing For Carp Survey Results: The Epicenter

Update 9/4/2014 - New York wasn't getting counted in my spreadsheet.  Fixed.

This is the first in a series of posts giving some of the results from the fly fishing for carp survey.  With more than 200 participants we have enough data to have some fun with the numbers.  First we will try and find the regional epicenter of the revolution.

If we look at the raw numbers by state Colorado had the most participants by a very wide margin.  I think there is no real surprise to those of us chasing carp in Denver.  After all, it can occasionally be difficult to find an open hole on the Denver South Platte.  The reasons are pretty easy to understand.  First of all, Colorado has the highest concentration of fly fishers in the country.  The more trout fly guys the more bored trout fly guys looking for a new challenge.  Additionally we have had our own in-state fly fishing for carp living legend Barry Reynolds spreading the gospel to local guys for over 15 years.  On top of that, Denver hosts Carp Slam - one of the oldest and most successful fly fishing for carp tournaments.

Instead of looking at the raw participants we should probably look at the number of participants on a per-capita basis though.  Colorado still comes out on top but the next biggest (Idaho) may be a big surprise to some .  Colorado and Idaho have allot in common though.  Primarily Idaho also has many bored trout guys and also hosts a carp tournament with a long and proud heritage.

The next one in line (Vermont) is a big surprise - especially since it sits smack dab in the middle of a region where the fly fishing for carp revolution doesn't seem to have much of a foothold.  I have no idea why, perhaps we can blame Lake Champlain which is reputed to be an excellent carp on the fly fishery.

Of course, the truth is that 200 participants is not enough to really split 50 ways.  Some of the states that are high in the per-capita list only had a couple of participants but don't have allot of population.  Instead we should step back and look at the big picture, so I re-calculated the per-capita by region instead of by state.

The trend is clear. The western mountain states region is the current epicenter of fly fishing for carp by a large margin.  I cannot say how much of this is due to the fishing and how much is cultural but it is interesting.

Fly Fishing For Carp Survey

UPDATE:  The poll is closed as of August 24th.  Stand by for processed results, although auto generated results are available at the link below.

I want to know more about the fly fishing for carp Revolution.  No.  I NEED to know - so do me a solid and fill out this survey.  You can either go to this link or fill it out below.  It is probably a little easier if you go to the link.  If you fill it out here you just have to page up to the top everytime you submit a page.

The current results can be viewed here at any time.