Monday, April 23, 2018

Giants and Ghosts

Yesterday Noah and I went to play with some carp with both bait and artificials. The pond is one Mark Alpert and I call the "Garbage Pond". Because there is an awful lot of garbage in the vicinity and in the pond itself. I take some of it away but it is very much a loosing battle. There are fish there though, and if there are fish I will fish for them.

I don't have very many conventional rods and reels any more, and I like fighting fish on a fly rod more anyway, so I fished bread and corn on a 20ft 8lb leader with my 5wt CGR and cast an orange mop fly with my 8wt while the bait soaked. Honestly, the bite was not as great as I expected. But we did catch some carp, and some exceptionally cool ones.






Out of all of the fat ad healthy little commons I caught I did get two fish that had a very different color, a type of carp commonly referred to as "ghost carp". The different pigmentation is the result of hybridization between a koi and a common carp. The white ghost carp, which is what both of mine were, have genes past down from Purachina Ogoh koi, also known as Platinum Ogon koi. I caught one on the fly and one on bait. They were very cool looking carp!




Of course, in this pond where I had never seen a fish even in the teens in weight, I managed to catch a fish well over 20 pounds. Disappointingly it was on the bait, not on the fly. But it was still a carp over 20 pounds on a 5wt fiberglass rod, and that is not to be taken lightly.









Any way you do it, catching fish is fun as hell. It just so happens to be a little bit more fun, for me at least, with a fly. So next time I think I'm going to have to catch the giants on the fly, good and proper, instead of on a fly rod with bait. 

3 comments:

  1. Its been said "fishing with bait is like swearing in church". Anyway I do use bait for black sea bass, tautog and fluke. No need to use bait for stripers or bluefish. Tog are an awful lot of fun, even while bait fishing. Those species we target with bait we eat. For my taste there's no better eating fish than black sea bass.

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    1. I must say casting live eels at night for large stripers is an exciting thing to do. I don't do it much but the thump when a 35lb bass eats an eel is electrifying. Black sea bass definitely are exceptional!

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  2. It's not hard to be a ghost in that water. Those dinos have interesting textures and colors. 8 lb. leader for sure.
    Tie, fish, write, conserve and photo on...

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