An Incredibly Beautiful Little Carp

Oddly, having caught some really big carp, for a while I have wanted to get one of the little guys on a fly. Believe it or not it's probably easier to find a 15 lb fish then a 1 to 5 lb fish on the waters I fish. But today I got lucky.  

I was fishing the flats at my carp pond this evening. Very few feeding fish were showing, but a couple big fish were leaping fairly close to shore. Eventually I began to notice some very subtle activity in the weedy parts of the flat. Small wakes, occasional bubble patches. I began to suspect that carp were the culprit. When one came cruising over the rocks towards me, making a wake but barely visible, I got my chance to see. I put my carp soft hackle in front of it and the fish ate it without hesitation. I set the hook and it jumped  leaped and splashed around, an I got a good look at it. Sure enough it was a carp. I was somewhat surprised that it took, it was cruising at a good pace when the fly fell in front of it. 

I have said more than once that if smallmouth were the size of carp they would kick their butts as far as fighting goes. Now I'm not so sure. I've caught some smallmouth that were similar in size to this carp, and they didn't take quite as much line as this fish, jumped but not right on the hook set, and tail-walked just as well. This fish had me second guessing myself. And in my humble opinion, it was one of prettiest fish I've ever caught.

I've never been able to hold a carp like this before. 

Now that I've got that out of the way, there are three more carp left on my bucket list: a grasser, a mirror, and a koi. But of course come 5 a.m. tomorrow I'm sure I'll be hoping for a 20 pounder.