Everyone has given good advice so far but let me chime in. I started carp fishing years ago targeting the cruising surface carp. That is my favorite way to fish when the oppurtunity presents itself but it can sometimes be tricky, since carp are used to bottom feeding they are real cautious on the surface. Their mouth angles down so to surface feed they must angle up and their vision decreases making them easy to spook. The trick is bread. The cheapest bread you can find, but fresh matter because you need it to stick and yet still float. When I bottom fish I use a hook that is a size 8, real small, but for surface you want a size 2, that has been ideal. Line size matters on top because they are more line shy. 6lb to 12lb is good, any bigger and it gets tougher. One piece of bread can bait the hook once, maybe twice but no more. On a good day I can burn through 4lbs of bread and bring in over 10 carp sometimes totaling 60lbs and up. Tear off the crust and keep it for chum. Tear out the bread into a circle shape and place the bend of the hook in the center. Squeeze and ball the bread above the eye of the hook but make sure the bend and point does not have bread balled around it. You want the bread around the point to be natural and uncompressed, this allows it to float. It should look almost like a lightbulb when you are done. The weight of the bread aids in casting so no float is needed. Now chum out the crust and watch for the fish feeding, throw your baited bread out around 3 feet from the fish and let it drift to them, do not reel it, they can tell it is unnatural and moveing faster than the chum. The fish will mouth the bait and in many cases swim away first then come back. Don't set the hook at first, wait for the line to make a V across the water as it is going away then set the hook. Tight lines and I will try to get a picture of the different ways I do my bread on topwater. Some fish became wary of the standard presentation so I mixed things up.
