Thanks for the welcome.
Since the fly neither tastes nor smells good to the carp, fly fishing for them is mostly a sight game, both on the part of the angler and the fish. We look for feeding carp, then plop the fly in front of their noses, let it sink, then one or two pulls -- and with luck the carp grabs the fly, thinking it's a prey item it has flushed out. In creeks, I've also caught them using trout nymphing technique.
We've had accidental catches on them as well, from everything from little P & Os, to steelhead flies, Black Ghosts, and honkin' huge saltwater streamer patterns (in the Niagara River Whirlpool). In the latter case, the carp exist by vacuuming up the dead and dying minnows produced by the massive hydraulics in the place. I got to watch one carp rise steadily in a back end, picking off these minnows like a trout rising for duns. At first I thought it was a big, lake-run brown but those lips were a dead giveaway. Speaking of duns, I've also seen them sipping hex duns (our largest mayfly) from the surface one evening while I was out fishing for mooneyes.
I've fished for them occasionally for the past seven or eight years but I'm still on the bottom of the learning curve.
Peter