Far out, the water rolls and glints. Close in, where engines idle and dark hulls lift, the last deadly cargoes are stowed. Then gears are engaged, rudders turn and the fleet heads out.

Time passes, then more time. On shore, keen eyes keep track at glowing displays. Numbers flicker, bright lines extend, coordinates converge. When they meet, doors below each waterline slide silently open and the loosened cargoes sink. As they fall, they disperse. Targets are blanketed. The fleet heads home, job done.

A naval assault on some new, distant trouble spot? An ancient war movie featuring vaguely familiar faces? Rush hour for the dredging fleet off Dover or Portsmouth? Well, maybe - but not when it’s happening day in and week out on a hundred inland lakes.

Bait boats, radio-controlled craft designed to carry anglers’ groundbait to places rod-casting cannot reach - and to drop baited lines after it with pinpoint accuracy - have become the latest craze to hit hard-core carp fishing. The cult centre of carp fishing is a surreal place, a world that most anglers would not recognise. It is a world where almost no expense is spared, almost no extreme is unexplored, in pursuit of the biggest and most powerful fish in Britain’s freshwaters. For hundreds and maybe thousands, bait boats have become the new must-have.

A sophisticated bait boat costs around £1,000. It will be two feet long, will carry up to 6lb of groundbait and have a range of better than 1,000 yards. It will be fitted with sonar so that water depths can be plotted and likely fish-lies discovered. An on-board Global Positioning System will ensure that cargoes of fish pellets, sweetcorn and the like can be sent to attract and hold fish in precisely chosen areas. The same systems will ensure that the baited hooks, lines and ledger-weights can be towed out to the same places, greatly increasing the chances of a bite if fish move in to feed. Bingo.

Except that bingo is not the word all anglers use. Many find that four letters can express their feelings more clearly. Bait boats, their extreme artificiality in an angling context, the catch-at-all costs mentality that many see them as exemplifying, have split the carp fishing community and been banned from many waters.

Stephen Stones, news editor of Angling Times, the sport’s tabloid weekly, says that bait boats are becoming more and more popular, then adds: “Personally, I can’t stand them. They’re an abomination. They reflect everything that angling isn’t, or shouldn’t be. Even pike anglers have started using them now - but everyone is entitled to their view.”

The problem for most anglers is that bait boats substitute technology for watercraft and casting skills. Boats can carry baited lines to awkward spots – under overhanging branches, for example, and to gaps in weed-beds – where normal casts could become ensnared. Because they can travel far beyond casting distance, they can be used to draw fish into water that other anglers cannot reach. Carelessly handled, they can cross neighbouring lines and tangle them up. They also create a commotion.

Sam Anslow, manager of the Monument Fishery, a well-known carp complex near Telford in Shropshire, agrees. “We have an outright ban on bait boats here. They take the skill out of fishing and can easily lead to conflict. Ninety-five per cent of our anglers feel the same.”

Enthusiasts, though, see bait boats as a natural extension of the way other technologies have been used in carp fishing. Until the 1950s, carp, the wiliest of fish as well as the biggest, were regarded as virtually uncatchable by design. Then Richard Walker famously landed a string of whopping fish, including a record of 44lb, using tackle he designed and built himself for the job. One of his developments was an electric buzzer to signal bites in the dark. Ever since, a minority has been turning the pursuit of Cyprinus carpio into a cult. Dedicated carpers will camp at the waterside for weeks on end. Television sets amuse during the long, fishless hours. Radio signals alert them to bites on batteries of rods sited far down the bank.

If camouflaged, military-style clothing, fixed-spool reels and electronic bite-detectors can be used, this group argues, why not bait boats? What is the fundamental difference between an angler using a boat to get his groundbait far out and an angler using a catapult to do the same, as millions do?

David Ostapiuk is among them. Ostapiuk manages Bluebell Lakes at Tansor, near Peterborough – a complex that, a couple of years ago, produced a British record carp weighing 64lb. He not only allows bait boats to be used but sells them on behalf of the water’s owners.

“Carp can be difficult,” Ostapiuk said. “At this time of year especially, you could camp out and fish nonstop for a week and not even get a bite – as many of our anglers do. You need every advantage you can get. Of course, you have to be sensible. I police this water closely to make sure no one’s upsetting anyone else.”

Contrary views surface in the press and on the angling websites and the wags have a heyday. On one site, a user advocates bait boats as a way of sending bacon butties to his pal on the opposite bank. A nonuser yearns for a remote-controlled submarine equipped with torpedoes to mete out justice. Yet another suggests “bait yachts” for the better-off carp angler.

It is all great fun but it all seems rather sad. For the vast majority of anglers, bait boaters have lost sight of what fishing has always been about, which is watercraft and wristy skills and, ultimately, restraint. It is not just baits that boats are sending through the floor: it is, many feel, time-tested conventions and moralities, too.

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