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.