I’m not much of a carp angler.
In fact, it angers me sometimes when I find myself casting for carp in watersheds once renowned for more illustrious native coldwater species. I know the world is changing, but has it really come to this? At best, I aim for the moral high ground and claim, to paraphrase Chief Joseph, that when the last steelhead and trout are gone I will fish for carp, like them or not, for I am an angler and I must have my freedom.
Of course, there’s always somebody who tries to point out that, hey, you don’t have to go fishing.
Ha, ha, ha, I think. Very funny.
Maybe if carp weren’t often so difficult to catch, bringing into question the level of my game, not to mention what I have to show for myself after all these many decades waving a fly rod at the water, I’d find it easier to sing their praise. Sore loser? I admit I’m often more easily enamored with fish that make me look good, especially big hungry wild fish that don’t seem to mind if I toss them a fly the size of a ping pong ball, even one that lands three feet behind them. On the other hand, carp needn’t be that difficult. I asked Brian O’Keefe recently what his secret for carp is. His answer? “Find them. Don’t spook them. Drag something in front of them.”
Like asking Wille Mays the secret to his game: “They throw the ball, I hit it; they hit the ball, I catch it.”
Thanks, Willie.
Thanks, Brian.
Worse, still, than such guileless insights is that, when pressed, O’Keefe revealed that his favorite carp fly is nothing more than a conehead brown woolly bugger.
Some secret.
Faced with the now-renowned wily carp, considered by many a fish as difficult to catch on the fly as any fish anywhere, we’re faced once more, in other words, with the notion that your fly is the least of your worries, the last thing, really, that matters.
For many of us, this is still a difficult idea to embrace. A look online for “best” carp flies, however, reveals such a broad spectrum of patterns and types of fly that it reminds me of looking at my thirty-year-old books filled with steelhead patterns, most of them concoctions that had little to do with presenting a fly that represented something a steelhead might actually eat in its time spent in a river. The idea, for many anglers, wasn’t to search so much for what steelhead wanted to eat but, instead, a fly pattern that, for whatever reason, a steelhead would grab or bite.
What a concept: How many of us really care – or know why – a fish takes the fly? What we want, in most cases, is that take – and we’d be happy to fish a fly that reminds us of our sweetheart’s eyelashes if that’s what the fish were striking.
Of course, the more we know about our prey, trout or permit or roosterfish, say, the more we do to create patterns that we hope mimic the food or foods on which they feed. Part of the reason, I suspect, that carp flies come in such a broad spectrum of colors, shapes, and styles is that carp are capable of living in such diverse aquatic environments and their food sources can vary so dramatically. We know what trout eat. We know what corbina eat. We know what roosterfish and smallmouth bass and bluegill eat.
But the only thing we usually know about carp is that they eat whatever’s in the water where we find them.
For example: I was back East last summer – where is not important – when I was invited to go carp fishing. My hosts, I should add, were serious anglers working for a serious big-name hunting and fishing operation. It didn’t appear that I was going to get an offer to visit an Atlantic salmon camp, so carp it was. We launched our driftboat below a small dam in quiet water surrounded by the kind of brick factory buildings you don’t see much in California – or anywhere west of the Rockies. We rowed out to the backside of an island, at one end of which was a mulberry tree, leaning out over the water, its ripe cranberry-colored fruit dropping into the water whenever a breath of wind stirred the rank, humid, summer air.
Every berry that fell was eaten by a carp.
We matched the hatch with the appropriately colored floating blueberry-sized ball of – whatever. The carp were wary, but not so that you couldn’t get a cast close to them, close without spooking them or putting them down completely. It wasn’t exactly Trico spinner fall fishing on Hat Creek, but you had to make the cast, get the “fly” to drift just so – and when a fish came up to eat, it felt about as good as it does in any type of sight fishing, even if you did want to pull away from, or look askance at, a full view of those tumescent rubbery lips.
My Carp Fly is an amalgamation of assorted patterns I’ve spotted over the years while watching carp fishing grow in popularity. That the fishery has expanded at the same time we’re witnessing a slow but steady decline in runs of coldwater anadromous species should give everyone cause for concern. At the same time, we might take some solace in the fact that carp have proven, beyond question, to be a genuine target for fly anglers, elevated in stature, perhaps, above mullet and maybe even milkfish.
Cobbling together patterns from a list of well-known or other existing patterns, most of them shared online, is tantamount to clicking your way to the final design of your new Tesla. Or playing Mr. Potato Head. That said, I know very few tyers who can help but tweak and fiddle their way to their eventual winning patterns, a process more forgiving than, say, boat design. All patterns are essentially a guess or hypothesis. The wily carp, a species as omnivorous as bears and raccoons, continues to inspire a wealth of “new and improved” patterns, some as alluring as bansaied Sequoias. I commend such efforts, knowing full well that too much of a good thing is one route, at least, to what’s often referred to as a hot mess.
We can’t have that.
Materials
Hook: TMC 2457, size 6
Thread: Black
Eyes: Black bead chain, small
Tail, Part One: Cocolate brown Vernille Ultra Chenille
Tail, Part Two: Olive brown marabou blood quills
Body: Peacock herl spun inside copper wire dubbing loop
Legs: Guinea fowl, dyed olive
Wing: Cow elk hair, dyed olive
Tying Instructions
Step One:
Secure the hook and start the thread. Build up a small bump of thread wraps, far enough back from the hook eye so as to not crowd it. Set your bead-chain eyes against the bump and secure with repeated thread wraps. Add a drop or two of Zap-A-Gap to soak into the thread wraps and help keep the eyes in place. I also tie this fly with a larger diameter bead chain and even small dumbbell eyes; my goal is a fly that sinks quickly to the bottom, depending on the depth, while creating as little disturbance as possible.
Step Two:
Directly behind the bead-chain eyes, secure the forward end of a two or three-inch length of ultra chenille. Winding aft, secure the chenille along the top of the hook shank. As you approach the tighter radius of the curved shank, adjust the hook in the jaws of the vise so that you end up securing the chenille deep into the bend of the hook. The fly is meant to settle upside down on the bottom, the bead-chain eyes resting on the bottom, the tail pointing toward the surface.
Step Three:
Clip the length of the tail about 1 ½ times the length of the hook shank. Use a match to carefully melt the end of the tail, creating a tapered point. Again, adjust the hook in the vise jaws, bringing the fly back towards a more level position. Find a marabou feather with an even tip of blood quills. Clip a tuft of blood quills. Wet them with a sponge or wet fingers, keeping the tips of the quills aligned. With the quill tips just short of the tip of the chenille, tie in the tuft directly on top of the chenille. Continue your thread wraps forward over the butts of the quills; keep the quills stacked neatly on top of the hook shank, creating an even underbody. Secure the butts directly behind the bead-chain eyes. Clip the excess.
Step Four:
Again adjust the fly so that it approaches a level position. Secure the end of an eigth-inch length of copper wire directly behind the bead-chain eyes. Wind your thread back to the root of the tail, covering one end of the wire. Create a loop in the wire. Leave yourself enough wire on the second leg of the loop so that it lies under the thread wraps as you advance your thread back to the bead-chain eyes. Hang a dubbing tool from the loop. Wax the legs of the loop. Now take three or four strands of peacock herl, insert the strands beyween the legs of the loop, and spin the dubbing tool until you get a tight bushy rope of herl and copper. Starting at the root of the tail, wind the herl and copper rope forward. Create an even body that ends just short of the bead-chain eyes. Secure the rope with your thread. Clip the excess rope and trim any loose herl strands that might have escaped while you were forming the body.
Step Five:
Find a dyed guinea fowl feather with quills about 1 ½ times as long as the hook gap. With the stem of the feather pointing up, the shiny good side of the feather facing you, strip off the fibers on the right side of the stem, leaving just a few at the tip. Now stroke the fibers on the opposite side of the stem, pulling them away from tip, and tie in the tip of the feather, good side facing you, directly behind the bead-chain eyes. Holding the feather by the stem, make two or three wraps, one on top of or just forward the other, keeping the stem turned so that the fibers point aft rather than flaring wildly, bottlebrush fashion. Secure the stem with the thread. Add a few extra thread wraps, if necessary, to tidy up the feather fibers.
Step Six:
Finally, for the so-called wing, you need to position the fly so that you can tie the dyed elk hair on the underside of the hook – which is actually the top of the fly if we view it resting on the bead chain eyes, the bend of the hook pointing upward. Clip a small tuft of hair from the hide, clean out any underfur, and stack the hair so that the tips are evenly aligned. With the hook point turned upward, tie in the wing so that the hair extends just beyond the hook bend. Clip the butts, tidy up the head with thread wraps, and saturate the wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
