Crucian Carp — Zen Disco

Keith Jobling treated me to a session at Napton Reservoir on Saturday afternoon. A fairly large water for the locality, but not one of those great reservoirs supplying water to the thirsty masses, rather a supply for the nearby Grand Union canal. Split in two pieces by a causeway, it was the reedy swims along that rocky structure that Keith reckoned held our best chance for one or two of the venue's lovely crucian carp. One of whom he'd caught last month.

Keith starts out with a distance feeder approach for large bream. 

I really love crucians and the difficulties they present. But I adore the dinner plate variety. Napton contains only this discoid (disc-shaped) type and none of the more common lentoid (lens-shaped) type. This is because crucians that live in waters stuffed with pike adapt their bodies in response and assume this shape as a brilliant survival strategy.

Lentoid crucian carp of one pound weight

Pike find it much, much harder to attack them successfully. The first reason is that the taller the body of a fish, the fewer pike in a water are able to grasp it because of gape limitations. Pike cannot open their mouths any further than their jaw structure allows. 

A discoid fish of one pound will be able to elude pike with gapes smaller than its height but not those with larger gapes, but a 2lb lentoid fish will be just as vulnerable because it is only as tall as the smaller discoid fish. 

However, a 2lb discoid crucian is much taller than the equivalent lentoid one and able to defeat the attacks of all but the very largest predators in the water. And there's always going to be very few of them.

A discoid crucian carp of half a pound is about as tall as a one-pound
lentoid example but much shorter than a half-pound example would be 

The second reason is one of maneuverability. Lentoid crucians are built for efficient cruising. Discoid ones are built not just for gape avoidance but also for agility because their shorter 'wheelbase' lends much quicker and far tighter turning ability. Imagine the difference between the Land Rover Defender 120 and the 90, if you will.

That matters a great deal when avoiding pike who are missiles that cannot turn once launched but rely completely on narrow focus binocular vision and high speed surprise frontal attack. 

A 'disco' crucian may more easily turn out of the way, avoid the strike, and cannot then be chased. The pike misses by half an inch and then its high-set forward-facing eyes completely lose sight of the prey. 

In a zen trance watching my float...

Anyhow, we didn't catch any!

But it was most fascinating failing to because the water is quite thinly populated with small fish. So bites, when we got them, were quite easy to spot if they arose from crucians. I spent my time sitting cross legged on a council slab focussed intently upon the antennae of my float not moving for 59.99 minutes of the hour. I mean with totally absorbed and unblinking attention. As if I had the one chance to do what I wanted and that was to bank one of these large and handsome fish for myself by observing a movement that might occur, if it occurred at all, during the blink of an eye.

... barely move the whole day long

I did have two or three bites on corn (maybe a few were missed because I had to blink...) but for some reason failed to connect. All we had to show were a handful of perch caught on caster, worm and maggot, and so we left around six, went to Long Itchington, had a pint or two at the towpath pub, and then fished the canal till nightfall under a glorious sunset for the sum result of one skimmer bream to my rod.

But the near margins of Napton's causeway had got right under my skin. I could think of nothing else but Crucian carp caught between a rock and a hard place.