Hello Carpness, My Old Friend

Ah yes. I am very satisfied with that title. Cheesiness and all.

If you are one of those that isn't a fan of carp, read on anyway. I have some cool cloudscapes to share. And some fireworks. The natural kind. Also, a bit of something for you fiberglass rods and vintage gear enthusiasts.

You know, the the first legitimately big fish I targeted to any degree on fly tackle were carp. Though I actively targeted big bass, and big trout, in the waters I regularly fish a big bass in five pounds and a big trout is 3 pounds. They get bigger, but if you've caught one that size, it's a big one. And to me those really aren't big fish. Carp get over 20lbs regularly... that's a big fish! I love fishing for them, but not only because they're big. They're also damned smart. Catching them is challenging. I also get some weird pleasure from the fact that any time someone asks me what I'm fishing for and I answer "carp", I get a strange look. That makes me smile and chuckle.

It has been a somewhat strange summer. I haven't targeted carp much, and what little bit I have done has been extremely unproductive. It might even be less productive than last year. Ouch! On Wednesday though I targeted them a little bit. Thunderstorm were on the horizon. They weren't going to impact where I was fishing, but the fish could feel the disturbance in the atmosphere and were chowing down.

The carp weren't just chowing down either, some of them were chowing up! To the left in this image is a surface feeding common. She was a big girl, I figured probably 20lbs. And I was going to catch her. But it was going to take some time.

I watched her for a while, eventually I gave her a name. I believe that when playing the game of whits one on one with a fish you want to catch, humanizing them a tiny bit doesn't hurt. I named her Splotches. She had and interesting splotchy white head and a couple color abnormalities on her body. So the color abnormality made for an easy name and fairly easy identification. Now I had to break down what she was doing, and turn that into a way to catch her.

I didn't think I would be able to deceive her on a dry fly. For the most part I could tell that the surface feeding was on small clumps of algae in which small macroinvertebrates like to live. She was also exhibiting what I believe to be zooplankton feeding, just sucking in and ejecting what looked to be empty water. Lastly, I saw her make definite moves to bottom feed. It was probably what she did least, but it was also what I was going to focus on. Her bottom feeds seemed almost random, like she was just spontaneously deciding to eat one thing off the bottom once or twice every minute or so. There was no timing, no pattern, no direction. So I concluded she was eating things she saw or felt move. Dragonfly nymphs, water beetles, crayfish, tadpoles... anyone who has waded a pond or lake or creek edge really slowly and knows what those things do when a large, moving object nears. They dive into the muck or weeds or debris. So. I wasn't going to give her a dry. I was going to drop the fly I already had on, a big Hare's Ear, fairly delicately a foot away from her and let it drop to the bottom. I was going to chose a moment when Splotches wasn't preoccupied eating something and I had the best angle on her. She gave me plenty of time. I chose my moment. Made the presentation. Splotches saw the fly fall, went from surface to bottom in one of the most decisive moves I have ever seen a big carp make, and ate with zero hesitation.

Now I should mention I was using my 5/6 weight CGR, light tippet, and a vintage Ted Williams reel with no backing on it, just fly line. Fighting a big carp on that tackle might seem like a loosing battle. If you know how to play fish, you can do so not only without loosing the fish, but without exhausting it too death. It has been said to death that anglers don't fight fish with side pressure enough. And yet I still see many not using it. It has been said to death that anglers don't put enough pressure on the fish. And yet they still don't. I don't get it. If I can do it it can't be that hard. With gear that is too soft, too old, too light, I fought and landed a near 20lb carp in less than five minutes.

So, at the literal end of he rainbow I found my first pot of gold in far too long. Pretty cool, that fish. I was pleased with myself. Pleased enough that I only made a few more casts that evening when the sky stole the stage. One of those few casts produced a big crappie, but even while I was landing that fish I kept glancing towards the heavens. 

 

What goes on in our own atmosphere is, to me, somewhat alien. Weather is so grand, so massive, and seemingly so complicated. Landscapes form, bigger than anything down here. They form like mountains, plateaus, plains, waterfalls, whirlpools... then they disintegrate. Almost like geology, but so fast that everything is much more turbulent. Violent. Earthquakes are destructive. So are volcanic eruptions. But the speed with which a completely clear blue sky can bubble into a supercell thunderstorm that could produce multiple powerful tornadoes then turn back into calmness and clearness again is remarkable. And more so that the same thing could happen in the same state the very next day. It's incredible. Even though we know it's all in the simple behaviors of heat, moisture, pressure, and wind, we struggle to comprehend it. 

On this day the atmosphere boiled and bubbled over Connecticut. The ingredients weren't there for tornadoes. But cumulonimbus clouds blasted miles into the air with speed and velocity so substantial it actually caused moisture in the atmosphere above the towers to condense into cap clouds called pileus. I have seen these many, many times before. But I don't remember the last time I watched a cumulonimbus cloud form and bust through pileus caps like this one did. It was a beautiful show. For frame of reference, the next photo sequence was taken over a span of less than 60 seconds. 

This little storm cell was already producing rain. As it mushroomed out, ice crystals that had formed around bits of dust in it's updraft knocked into each other and produced a charge. Somewhere on the ground near the storm to it's rear flank was an area with the opposite charge. 

A bolt of lightning left the side of the storm's tower and probably burnt the bejesus out of some tree somewhere far enough outside the periphery of the cloud that many would think they were safe from lightning there. It was pretty clear what I was going to be doing for the rest of my time on the lake.