One Damsel Eater for the Day

I went out early-ish this morning to look for some hungry carp. I say early-ish because we've passed the autumnal equinox and the sunrise is painfully late. So it wasn't really that early but the sun wasn't yet above the horizon. Carp were not hard to find but they were hard to cast to. I found some of the most aggressively tailing carp I've ever seen. Usually a carp that's tailing well makes very little sound, but these ones were tailing so vigorously they were actually sloshing the water. They would have been easy targets had they not been under a heavily brushed bank. I tried, there was no way I was getting a fly to those fish from shore. In a kayak it would have been easy. The carp I found in open areas were not feeding nearly aggressively, and there also weren't that many of the.

The carp in that pond were not particularly obliging but the crappies were, jumping on the chartreuse mop left and right. That wasn't my goal though, so I changed locations. It took a short time to find carp, and the third I found was bumping through the weeds eating damsels. It's fun to watch damsel eaters, some of them will knock the weeds and eat the macroinvertebrates that fall off, and that's what this fish was doing. These are easy targets, as they typically eat whatever slowly sinks down around their weed clump. I had a damsel on already, and fooling that fish was pretty easy. I would say the fight was to since the fish really had nowhere to go, I just had to wear him down. It was a solid carp for that water body, 32 inches and just starting to show some fall weight gain. 

And that's all I needed. A little bit of a fix for my carp addiction.