Your fishing success can become instintive and progressively easier to achieve consistently with repetition... I'm like any other passionate fisherman in that I love to be at the waterside as often as possible, not necessarily fishing, but simply taking in the energy of the surroundings. There's much to be said for this kind of 'tuning-in.' Very often it's the build-up of thousands of hours of experience at waters, that leads to development of instinctive actions and luck and following such intuitions in your fishing definitely go hand in hand.
You can read and read the carp magazines for instance, repeatedly and fill your head with everything under the sun from the latest rig ideas and commercial baits on offer to "sexy" bait adverts! You can read how the prevailing "big names" are "purportedly" (as well as genuinely) catching their carp. You may be in complete ignorance of the many advantages over the humble "average angler" many "profile anglers" may have which in combination make a tremendous difference to consistency and big fish results.
You can read and read but discover that what you read stimulates inner conflicts in your mind as different contributors pedal their "advertorials." Finding "unbiased" media contributions is often like finding a needle in a haystack these days. Should I use a plastic bait? Should I use a "food" bait? What about pellets? Should I use a "stiff rig" or a "combi-link," this rod or that reel, this alarm or that one? "So and so" puts out loads of free bait but then he's sponsored by a bait company and gets free bait. So what's best? Context and timing and being in the "right place at the right time" really matter. Getting the right formula of factors together is all part of the jigsaw that is carp fishing. Some say location and bait are the two most important factors. Well a very sharp reliable hook and loads of confidence help a little too.
There is one thing I do know about carp and that is they can be very crafty. Nothing replaces carp behavioural observation in the presence of anglers and our boats, lines, rigs and movements on the bank, despite however much "camouflaged" clothing and gear you buy. Yes, carp are conditioned to survive and they have a considerable armoury and evolution at their disposal. But so have we. One of the keys to successful fishing, is to use the fishes own essential requirements, senses, behaviours and conditioning against them. We're actively involved in their behavioural "programming" anyway, by casting a line, baiting up, hooking fish and generally messing with their natural environment so "natural feeding" is
I'd say this rubs off onto many a fisherman too. If these guys with a genuinely potent fishing edge go and tell thousands of competing fellow anglers, before it had been well and truly exploited? (Especially if any kind of "vested interest" financially or otherwise is involved.) Many such anglers feel the requirement to maintain "above-average" catch results in the public eye and to continue to appear consistently successful.
All this is well and good; many anglers can keep catching above average catches because their ability and experience are greater than average. There are some truly amazing anglers about. But the important point is they are not all "name anglers" and indeed many wish to keep a low profile. This is especially useful on waters which get heavily pressured.
Sometimes it can seem that the well-known anglers appearing in the papers and magazines every week are some kind of "elite." How do they get access to those syndicates and hard to join waters, how do they afford to live while fishing pretty much full-time, what about all the travelling costs, tackle and bait costs etc, etc? The fact is, they mostly get there by their own efforts and if you are doing very regular fishing, then any extra money for articles, "consultancy" or even in the form of free bait, can make a significant difference. It is very hard to succeed in carp fishing because it requires some degree of sacrifice of other aspects of life.
For example, I was speaking to a friend of top carper Terry Hearn one time and he was saying how he had forgone girlfriends in order to be able to focus on becoming the best, or words to that effect. At 21 I planned most of my life's activities around carp fishing after a near-death experience left me questioning what would be most important thing in my life if I lived. My sacrifice was to have a markedly reduced income as a result of focussing on fishing not making money. However I think you'll find that anyone who has a very real near-death experience will relegate money to the bottom of their list of valued things in life.
