So I fish pretty close to a couple hundred days a year most years. But I don't post anywhere near that many reports because I like to have a good fish to report on. Or maybe I've just gotten skunked. Or caught bluegills. Or I've been doing some off the wall thing like wasting the entire trip chasing clooping fish....
What the heck is clooping?? Well if you google clooping you will get two definitions. Definition number one is where your buddy walks up and hits you in the groin while you're not looking. That's not the one we are talking about. Definition number two is when a carp (or hopefully a whole bunch of carp) is sitting mostly in one spot and sucking food down off the surface.
In the summer most of our rivers have a decent mayfly hatch or two. And many many summer days and evenings there are huge hatches of tiny midges. Well I dunno if they are a midge or not but there are huge clouds of tiny insects on the river this time of year. And what happens is most of these guys end up in the river. Find a big eddy and look closely at all that junk slowly circling. In the summertime there are a lot of days where the vast majority of the "junk" is rafts of tiny dead bugs floating on the water. Floating by the millions even, if you look close you will sometimes be amazed at just how many there are. And most of the floating "junk" that isn't a tiny bug in summer is often plant material like fluffy seeds. An all you can eat smorgasbord if you will for hungry carp. In big eddies below riffles or below lowhead dams there are sometimes pods of a dozen carp slowly swimming almost in place gulping mouthfulls of floating bug filled foam off the surface.
All summer I keep a fly rod behind the truck seat for when I run into clooping carp. While I've done it, I usually don't do a lot of "normal" fly fishing for carp. You know the spot and stalk of tailing carp in small streams and rivers. Not because it's not fun or cool but because if I'm wading a stream fishing you can bet ninety percent of the time I'm chasing smallmouth. But let me find a pod of clooping carp and I'll drop everything.
If there is a pod of clooping carp you have a big advantage. All those carp milling around and sucking things off the surface gives you a bit of cover. Unlike a single carp feeding by itself, a carp in a herd of cloopers has a lot of distractions. He's a lot less likely to spook if your presentation isn't absolutely perfect. And If your careful you can usually get a bit closer to clooping carp than you can to tailing carp which adds to the fun. And there is the big plus that it's a surface take and so much more visual.
I've found that most of the time if carp are clooping all I need is one fly. Daclooper I call it. It's pretty much a small white marabou and chenille streamer with a gold bead head. But it's not a normal bead head. Bead heads are supposed to flash and add a bit of weight to help the fly sink right? Well on Daclooper instead of a normal brass bead it's actually a plastic one painted brass. So it's flashy and buoyant instead. I use a nine foot leader and put floatant on the leader up to about ten inches from the fly. Then I cast to edge of the pod leading a fish and just let the fly set there. It sorta just hangs there in the scum right at or just barely under the surface. The carp is just barely moving so there isn't much of a strike. Mostly just a tiny twitch of the leader or just as likely you will raise the rod to cast again and find a big carp on the other end of the line. If you haven't ever had a big carp hooked on the other end of a fly rod you have been missing one of the funnest goat rodeos around. Just a minute of pure chaos followed up by pure power.
It usually takes ten minutes or so for carp to resume feeding after you've busted up their party by hooking one and most of the time it's never quite as many fish as you first saw. What I'll do most of the time is wander off smallmouth bass fishing but check back in after a half hour or so. Sometimes doing this you can catch several carp in one evening.
What I haven't done and haven't heard of anyone doing if someone wants to invent a new twist on niche fishing is fish for cloopers at night. Some years I've did a lot of another pretty out there fishing technique which is chase shovelhead catfish at night with big swimbaits and rattletraps. One good place to do this below lowhead dams. And I can't tell you how many times at night I've seen the heads of big carp up clooping the foam below the dam. I'd say that almost every summer night you sneak up to the eddies below lowheads where all the foam and bugs and "junk" circles if you look close there will be a few carp feeding off the top.
Carp clooping. Try it sometime you just might like it...
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