Carp fishing, explained by someone who spent twenty years getting it wrong first.
Location, bait, rigs and gear, written from the bank rather than from a spec sheet. No filler, no guesswork, and I say plainly what I have fished and what I have not.
250+ guides written from experience
Where do you want to start?
Pick the one that sounds like you. Each path is a short, ordered route through the guides that matter, not a pile of articles.
The guides worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions I get asked most. Read these and you are ahead of most anglers on the bank.
Gear, without the sales pitch
I split every recommendation into three honest groups: kit I own and fish, kit I have handled, and kit assessed on specification. The label is on the page. Nobody has tested every rod on the market, and I will not pretend to.
Read how I test and review gear →
Rods, reels, alarms, bivvy and bait, listed openly with notes on what has lasted and what has not.
Who writes this
I am Shane Stanford. I have fished for carp for more than twenty years, in the UK and in France, and I currently fish a private syndicate water in West Sussex. Most of what I know I learned by getting it wrong first: the wrong rod for the water, the wrong rig for the lake bed, hours behind motionless rods in swims that never held a fish.
Fishing Again is the site I wish had existed then. It is funded by affiliate links, which never decide what gets recommended, and everything on it is written the way I would explain it standing next to you in the swim.
Autumn is the best feeding window of the year
Water temperatures are starting to fall and the fish know what is coming. This is the month to bait heavier than you did in August: bigger, oilier food and more of it. Fish are moving off the shallows into slightly deeper water on the edge of features, and they are feeding hard through the first two hours of light.
If you only fish one session this month, make it a dawn start after a mild night with a bit of south-westerly on the water.
Shane Stanford has fished for carp for over twenty years, in the UK and in France, and currently fishes a private syndicate water in West Sussex. He writes Fishing Again to put the things he learned the hard way into plain language: location and watercraft first, then bait, rigs and gear. He is straight about which kit he has actually fished and which he has assessed on specification, and says so on the page.