There’s a point where swear words are completely ineffectual and only snagging can express your true feelings for a balky adversary. With small fish it’s the thrown rock that creeps unbidden into your psyche – but with the big brute measured in kilos, only a large treble can restore lost honor.
While most of you have some small traces of scruples, I do not.
I spent the early part of Sunday hidden in the tules lining the bank making casts to large, fat, fish in excess of 15 lbs. After failing to even make a fish pause, I ransacked my collection of itty-bitty flies for a 4/0, and finding none – mentally calculated whether it was possible to construct the equivalent with dried grass and a couple hundred #8’s …
It was something primeval … old school, and had nothing to do with conservation. I’d release it after I was done, but only after hitting it a few more times with a rock.
So much for the carp fishing, I matched wits with them yet again and came up fishless.
I moved further up and did quite well, hooking and long-lining a nice smallmouth, and landing the first big fish of the season - a super aggressive Pikeminnow with a taste for his master’s boot …
… and we caught the rare “Orange Finned Bull Trout”- popular among those that fancy adipose fin photography …
Especially popular amongst the unfortunate anglers whose primary quarry gave him the Cyprinid Finger, despite pockets full of test flies and sure things.
Note: I’ll be doing extensive work related travel between now and Christmas, so posting will be shortened and brief, and only part of each week. This gives you a welcome breather – and allows me a bit of time off from the relentless invention of news that you would as soon do without.
Looks like my kind of water!
It was a pod of 20 fish, most in the teens, some bigger – and while I belly crawled to the edge undetected – and drifted the fly to them rather than tossing it at them, the result was the same.
Bloody tough fish, heartless and unaccomodating. Naturally, we’d have it no other way …
I come to you for a lot of things.
News is not one of them.
As to the title of this post, are you sure that fish that refuse to bite a bent piece of metal with a razor-sharp point, often covered in unnaturally colored plumage, are really all that “stupid?”
Safe travels.
Wow, either my sense of scale is off or thar be monsters in them waters. Come spring you should quit your job, get a sleeping bag and make your own “Invade Carp Waters” movement.
…DuPont Spinner…nuff sed…
I’m sure John is drooling looking at the firt pic. Especially since our carp season is over for the year (and was pretty weak sauce to start with).
Are you sure you used the Free Range crack, I mean dubbing, in the flies that got rejected?