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Bread soaked in TCP for Carp!!!


Guest Gaffer

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Guest Gaffer

I was talking to a guy who fished a lot in South Africa, he said that a good bait for Carp was bread soaked in TCP!!!! eek.gif

 

He said you could smell other carp anglers for miles!

 

Anyone else heard of this method?

Won't it harm the Carp?

 

He also said that they had to go down in cages when fixing the damns because the huge Barbel kept on biting them!! eek.gif

 

 

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All the best,

 

Gaffer

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Guest fisherman

Hey Gaffer, perhaps he was just thinking about the fish by making sure his hooks were disenfected for them so as not to catch any nasty diseases from us anglers. eek.gif

Dave

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Guest Graham E

Certain species of fish (Africa) are caught on soapbars so there could be something in this. But if I have to come clean on this, I think I will not be testing it out!

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Guest Elton

Graham,

 

I remember seeing John Wilson on the TV catching catfish in (I think) Canada. Most people think I'm joking, or have been smoking something, when I tell them - glad someone else knows what I'm talking about!!

 

All the best,

 

Elton

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Guest Martin Salisbury

I have a bottle of TCP in my drawer, it was the miracle cure for my sore throat 12 hours before running the london marathon this year.

 

I will make a promise now to try some on a lump of bread this summer and will then report back

 

Martin

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Guest davidP

Blue soap is used to catch vundu catfish in the Zambezi catchment. It's an excellent bait for them because seemingly nothing else will eat it, and I've used it on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, particularly in the Sanyati Gorge which is an area where the vundu seem to congregate.

The soap itself is a very coarse soap and I believe it's animal-fat based. It comes in blue or green bars about a foot long, 3 inches wide and an inch deep. It's very cheap (just a few pence a bar) and is used as a universal soap for anything you can think of that needs soap. It is getting harder to find mind as peoples tastes get westernized.

Anyway, what you do is break up the bar, put it in a cloth and then beat/knead it until it's a smoothish texture, much like you would when making a paste. Then mould a lump the size of a chicken egg around a 6/0 hook and chuck it off the back of the boat. In deeper water you can sometimes add a small drilled bullet. Then to my mind the important thing is to let your boat drift with the wind but slowly - a drogue is excellent in these situations. You want the bait to bounce along the bottom slowly disolving and leaving a very strong taste trail so that the fish follows it when it comes across it. Fishing with the drogue to slow you down really can make a 4:1 fish difference in my (admittedly limited) experience. The fish then follows the trail, picks up the bait then normally trundles off in search of another meal until it realises something isn't quite right at which point all hell breaks loose!

 

I'll see if I have any photos of the bait that I can scan in, and maybe a picture of a few big kippers as well biggrin.gif

 

If you ever get the oportunity to go to Kariba (assuming the country doesn't decend into civil war) then do whatever it takes to be able to afford it - you really won't regret it.

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Ivory soap has long been a standard for one of the US catfish species. There are times when they will take the soap before lobworms or any of the other usual baits.

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Guest Chris Shaw

They use lumps of soap to catch carp and barbel, but do not forget most of what they catch they eat, so it does not matter.

 

Does it harm the fish, well what can be said here when you think about all the stuff that we put into carp baits these days. In all my years of carp fishing I have heard of a few things being put into carp baits that you more than likely would not even contemplate.

 

Chris Shaw

 

They played on while the reel handles spun in unison.

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by Chris Shaw (edited 12 June 2001).]

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Guest davidP
Originally posted by Gaffer:

I was talking to a guy who fished a lot in South Africa, he said that a good bait for Carp was bread soaked in TCP!!!! eek.gif

 

 

He also said that they had to go down in cages when fixing the damns because the huge Barbel kept on biting them!! eek.gif

 

 

In Southern Africa the barbel they refer to is actually the sharp toothed catfish (Clarias gariepinus). They can grow to over 70lb but a 20lb fish is a good one. One of my most distatefull fishing sessions was fishing for them with live frogs - not the actual fishing but the hooking the frog bit eek.gif

 

 

If you ever see the African wildlife films where they show the catfish surviving the drought in pools of mud, walking across land to water or being the first fish to appear after rain then this is the fish they're talking about.

 

 

Have a look here for a picture http://www.fishingowl.co.za/indexspec.html

http://www.fishingafrica.com/fishpictures8.html

 

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by davidP (edited 14 June 2001).]

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Originally posted by Chris Shaw:

They use lumps of soap to catch carp and barbel, but do not forget most of what they catch they eat, so it does not matter.

 

I'm curious now. Exactly what harm would you expect from the blue soap mentioned for the African catfish or the ivory soap we use for US catfish? Same would go for soap used to catch carp or barbel. I'm not sure about the blue soap but I do know that a child can eat ivory soap and take no harm. Carp have a somewhat more robust digestive system than children so I would expect them to do fine too.

 

Gaffer what is TCP?

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