Do Carp Feed When It's Raining?

Can Rain Affect Carp Fishing?

I would say that in most cases rain would actually encourage carp to start feeding, especially in the summer when it helps to oxygenate the water. The only reason rain may cause carp to stop feeding, is if the rain is consistently very heavy, or if it’s cold rain and causes the temperate of the water to drop. In this case, the fish could decide to move on to a different area of the lake which provides more warmth.

In the winter months, if you were fishing in fairly shallow water and it started to rain heavy, the cold rain would affect the shallow water quickly causing the fish to become uncomfortable. Therefore in this situation, the fish will probably move on, no matter how much bait you have provided them. The carp would more than likely return to wallop up the rest of your bait when the water temperature rises once more. This is usually during a bright morning as the sun hits the shallow water. In this case, a carp angler might start to believe that carp don’t feed when it rains, when in fact they do feed most of the time.

This is actually a hard question to answer because it really depends on several factors. Plus, as the example above suggests, many situations when fishing for carp could cause confusion simply through some coincidence. If carp do ever stop feeding during rain, it could be for another reason other than the rain itself; maybe they have become full or finished off all your free bait just as the rain had started. Maybe the air pressure has changed lately. It could just have simply become the feeding "switch off" time for the carp in that particular water. All lakes have different patterns for when the carp prefer to feed, so any drop in carp catch rates could simply be because it’s the wrong time!

There are many reasons why carp won’t feed, and if the timing is right, many of the causes could give the impression that it was due to the rain, or another reason, that caused carp to stop feeding. For these reasons, I think it’s important to keep an open mind about why any species of fish stop feeding.

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Carp Location in the Summertime

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Location of Most Carp in Autumn

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Fishing Tactics for Snags & Trees

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