Hunting for carpzilla

 I decided that in 2014 I would be targeting the giant carp of Clear Lake.
I also wanted to become proficient in fly fishing.
So, i'll be fly fishing for carp.
Im starting to gather info and I thought that I would give the NCKA a chance to show what it knows about this smart and spooky fish.
It's all very new to me so help is appreciated.

A few years back, I was fishing the full moon and caught this humble specimen. I have spotted carp that are 2X this size in the shallows of Clear Lake.

Tie up a few flys that look like mulberry fruit, dandelion flowers and cottonwood fluff for topwater/reaction bites.  For nymph action I would go with a swimming mayfly imitation in a #12.
Long long leaders are a must so you'll probably have to tie them up yourself, but when I had the most success I was using about 16 feet on an 8 weight with a tippet of 5x to 3x.  Your best chance of landing them will be in weed free flats, otherwise they bolt for the weeds and wave goodbye.
Also, get out early or late to avoid much of the spook factor.

back in the day I targeted carp a lot, they are so much fun and make bass look like lazy fatties...

Good luck and have fun.

 Thanks for the starter info Rockfish!
I have a lot of studying and practice ahead of me.

Corn.

Light, gentle shadow cast with corn on a small hook? Slow sinking line?

Carp are the 18 wheelers of the lake. Like hooking a freight train.

Most of our lakes are full of them too.

Good luck!

These are about the size you caught. Niles aqueduct. Over at the slough in Hayward they are huge.

I grew up in Illinois, the biggest fish I had ever seen was a 6 foot carp with 6 inch spines along it's back. I've since seen bigger sturgeon but when you are a kid that was giant

Going after my KW record eh? I found them to be the most difficult fish ive targeted to date. They are very spooky and when fishing for them in the delta the bite window was very short. I tried corn and ive tried the store bought stuff but none worked as good as the homemade.  I also noticed that during the spawn they did not want to bite at all. The small ones were surfacing like crazy when I was at clear lake the other day, had me excited till I saw they were carp. They pull hard for sure, bet that will be fun as hell on a fly rod! Good luck.

If you tie flies, I would take MASA, and make it soupy, and marinate the chenielle (yellow) in it. Then tie a #8 short shank, wooly bugger style, and wrap the body with gold wire, and a grizzly hackle. Not sure how long the scent would bleed, but having a 35 mm film can of the masa to treat your fly periodically might work, and just dead drift, and pull slack to keep it semi-tight lined. Might be fun.

Lake Don Pedro is FILLED with these giant Carp in the Marina.  We sat there for nearly an hour & fed them an entire box of Apple Jacks cereal.  They couldn't get enough!  They would only eat one of the two colors though .... maybe it was the orange color.  Can't remember now ... that was like two years ago.

When I was younger we were trying to catch them at the marina. A lady that worked there came out and gave us some bread. We lost count after that you couldn't keep them off the hook.

 There are some common themes that I am discovering in my studies.
Here are a few of the quotable reinforcers.

"You cannot, of course, fish for big carp in half a day. It takes a month."
                                                                       H.T. Sheringham 1912

"A man who fishes habitually for carp has a strange look in his eyes."
                                                                           A. Ransome 1929

"The carp is the queen of rivers_a stately, a good, and a very subtle fish."
                                                                                    I. Walton 1653

 Much like waving around the fly rod, I can already tell that it will be many years before I will be proficient at consistently fooling the big carp.
Fortunately that "journey is the destination" philosophy applies.

When the cottonwoods start dropping their duff and the carp start targeting the drifts of the stuff I roll some of that cotton on a bare hook and cast it to them. It can be rolled so that it floats, use the dry stuff. You see them slurping it off the surface and they will take a ball of it away from the main drift of the stuff. It's dry fly fishing, poor man style, and exciting as heck. Good luck Terry.

 Thanks for the help Juan!  Im hoping to absorb as much useful information as I can before the carp start showing. Im learning to fly cast on the INDO board and hoping that it will translate.
It also looks like ill be spending more time on the north end. Hope to see you out there.

I used to catch hundreds of Carps back in Texas.  My "secret" bait is 1 box of cheap cereal mixed with sesame and grind them in the blender until they become powder.  Bring the mixed powder to the lake and add water to make a dough then cover the hook with this dough.  I don't use any weight jut let the hook slowly sink to the bottom and wait.