600 hours = one carp

Carp fishing in Finland is just as it should be. Basically there are no commercial waters (except a few ones, which are under very low fishing pressure). What we have in Finland is 187 000 lakes of over 500 square meters. Of that huge amount of lakes, hundreds are stocked with carp. These lakes are mostly situated in Southern Finland.

On most occasions, there are no official records of carp stockings. In some cases there are some official markings of when and where some amounts of carp were put. Usually they have never been fished for carp since the stocking occured.

So when I start to fish a new lake, it is always a mystery to be solved. Where in particular the carp of this lake like to feed... or are there any carp left? So when I wake up in the middle of the night because of my bite alarm going crazy, it's a lot more that just catching a carp... It's more like a discovery!

Sometimes it's a struggle with long times of blanking. This summer started with ending a streak of ca. 600 hours of blanking! The unhappy time ended with me catching a 9 kg dark-marble coloured mirror! Oh the joy and disbelief! I already thought my bite alarms were jinxed...

But as H.T. Sheringham once wrote:

Carp Table

One day = eighteen hours. *

Eighteen hours = one potato

Ten years = one carp

*summer calculation

Carp fishing in my opinion shouldn't be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. It SHOULD be difficult, and EVERY bite should be considered as "happy time". Big fish I like, but chasing PBs is just one way of carp fishing. I don't find that kind very rewarding. Learning is rewarding, and discovery.

In this photo is the remarkable fish that ended my epic blanking streak. I'm not fishing the lake at the moment, so let's see if I am returning to that lake again some year.