I’ve decided that when a sinful, but devout fly fisher dies and goes to hell, he is doomed to fish for eternity in a beautiful, wadeable pond filled with nothing but carp. Fearing that hell, I’ve been backtracking some of the paths I’ve taken in my life in hopes of becoming more righteous. Since I’m not sure that is working, I’ve also been trying to become a better carp fly angler.
My brother-in-law, R. G. Fann, likes to ask me, with more than a trace of sarcasm, “How’s that working out for you?”
The truth is, it’s not. I will tell you about every carp I’ve ever hooked on a fly in this short piece. While I’m driving myself further insane trying to catch a carp, R. G. happily goes off and catches bass or bluegills or trout while I am spooking carp or getting snubbed by them.
Novelist Thomas McGuane has a book of sporting essays entitled The Longest Silence, and the title essay is about flats permit fishing with a fly and the long periods between actually having one pick up a fly. My only conclusion is that he never tried to fly fish for carp, or that species would have had the title essay. The book might have been called The Endless Silence.
I was a happier man when I distained carp as a trash fish. R. G. drinks because of women. I drink because of carp. Halfway through a bottle of Jameson, we can sing a flawless rendition of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson’s “Reasons to Quit,” harmonizing beautifully on this lyric: “And the reasons for quitting don’t outnumber all the reasons why.”
Carp have always been in the background of my fly-fishing career. As a young man, the day I hooked and caught the biggest brown trout of my life from the East Walker River, I had also hooked and lost an even bigger carp that made my heart thunder until I saw it was just a carp. I didn’t even care when the fish broke off, except that I had lost a perfectly good fly. While fishing for spring bass, we would see them at Lake Silverwood and especially at Lake Perris, where fleets of huge carp would drift past like an armada. They were at Lake Skinner, and the Colorado River is jugged with them. In fact, there were just about everywhere.
The carp were there when we fished for bluegills and pumpkin seeds at Big Bear Lake in the spring. (This was where R. G. developed his pop-and-drop fishing technique — a popper with another piece of leader tied to the bend of the popper’s hook and a nymph tied to that leader. But that is another story.) But we would watch the much bigger carp cruising through the same shallows where we were hooking our preferred species, blue-collar to be sure, but not as lowly as carp.
I am a little loath to admit that we developed a technique for catching carp back in those days that we felt was worthy of these trash fish at Big Bear Lake. We snagged them with steelhead flies. Now before you get all huffy and dismiss this technique as unsporting and decide we are lowbrow cretins — and we may be — you have to understand that we were young. We rationalized that after the five hundredth time a carp ignores a damselfly nymph twitched right in front of its nose — young men get impatient — alternatives were in order. We had tried to catch them legitimately on all manner of nymphs, even our best trout ties. We tried flagrant and goofy things — black-and-orange Woolly Worms, chartreuse Hare’s Ears, Royal Coachman–Black Gnat crosses. They snubbed our imitative and creative offerings. We even bought bow-fishing gear and resorted to shooting carp with arrows. If that is legitimate, we reasoned, snagging them didn’t seem all that egregious. R. G. and I developed it to high art. (OK, that might be stretching it.) We would wait, heronlike, for cruising carp, or we would stalk fish lurking around in weeds and, keeping the leaders short, cast weighted steelhead flies in front of them. We would strip the fly back and just as the fish passed under the leader ahead of the fly-line juncture, we would do a rip set parallel to the water. I don’t remember which of us did this first out of frustration, but it worked. We decided it was like bonefish fishing on a tropical flat. It required precision casting, careful fly positioning, vigorous hook sets: it all fit the fly-fishing criteria. And let me tell you, a two-pound carp hooked in the back just ahead of the dorsal fin can make some epic runs. Often, the fly would pull free. Other times, after a “bump” hook set, we would notice the fly had a scale attached. I saved those scales as trophies.
Most of the guys in the fly-fishing club would scowl at us when we shared what we were doing. Snagging? With fly gear? Well, when you say it like that, it does sound bad, and we eventually grew out of it. R. G. simply went back to ignoring carp, but I couldn’t let go that easily.
I couldn’t give up on carp for some simple reasons. Carp can live longer and grow bigger in an anaerobic cesspool than trout that live in the cleanest, richest, most oxygenated cold-water river on the planet. But carp will also thrive in that same river, get bigger than the trout, and be far more difficult to catch. Bottom line: they are available everywhere, even close to our urban homes.
Carp are the most powerful fish we can catch in fresh water on fly tackle. They are pugnacious, running bass off their own spawning beds. They fight harder than a bluegill (if only those got to 20 pounds) and make a trout seem wimpy by comparison. Even stripers, which are really a half-saltwater fish, don’t have anything on carp.
Also know this: carp represent the biggest fish you will find in most of the fresh waters we fish. Three-to-six-pounders are common, even in small city and county park lakes here in Southern California, and all waters have bigger carp. In the nearly forty years I’ve been doing newspaper fishing reports, I can’t think of a single pond, lake, or reservoir where I haven’t seen photos of carp topping 10 pounds. In the spring and summer, I get pictures of 20-pounders every week. They are common.
Since my snagging days, I have continued to try to catch carp wherever I see them. Sadly, carp have made me realize I’m not much of a fly fisherman. I can catch trout with regularity on flies, and bass and bluegills are predictably easy. The only carp I can be assured to hook on a fly are the ones that live in marinas and that are fed wads of bread daily by tourists. That is known as chumming. Most fly fishers say it is unethical, not to mention illegal. Since I’ve learned my lesson about antisocial behavior with snagging, I’ve avoided the temptation to do this. Mostly.
Well, there was one time, and it was even before the snagging episode, I think, or maybe not — my memory is not so good — but it was a long time ago. I was young, and we were at Lake Mead, about to go on a houseboat adventure for a long weekend. There they were, cruising around the docks: carp. Big ones. Someone threw out some pieces of white bread. Pretty soon there were half a dozen big carp practically eating out of our hands. A fly rod was quickly assembled. The bread supply was cut off, but the carp kept cruising around. A big white marabou streamer was close enough, and I slapped it on the water three feet ahead of the biggest carp. It slipped up and inhaled the marabou. I set the hook pretty hard, and the carp reacted even more violently. The rod snapped right at the second guide, and I ended up landing the fish from the butt section. It was a battle. In spite of the fact it was hand-fed and chummed, I’m counting this fish as one I caught on a fly.
I know a lot of you count hatchery trout. Cut me some slack.
That fish broke some barriers for me. First, it was huge. I don’t know how big — I’d never caught a fish that size in freshwater before, so I had nothing to gauge it against. It was somewhere between 10 and 30 pounds. How’s that?
My anticarp bias has dissolved in disjunct fishing episodes scrambled around in my mind. Today, they haunt me. Norman Maclean might have been haunted by rivers, but I am haunted by carp. Today, when I see carp while wading shallows for bass, I usually change my tactics and try to catch them. I will be honest with you: carp are more difficult to catch consistently on a fly than any other game fish in the state.
First, they are spooky as heck. I’ve cast flies at them on Topaz Lake in the eastern Sierra on the border of Nevada and California when they were up midging on the surface. I’ve cast at them at Lake Silverwood and Big Bear Lake when they were eating damselfly nymphs. And I’ve waved my rod parallel to the water at Lake Perris while they were feeding on ants blown onto the surface. Actually, those are some assumptions I’ve made about what they were eating. I may have been casting to them with imitations of my assumptions, when the actual “hatch” was some sort of bottom or floating vegetation. Mostly, I’ve spooked the crap out of them. I know that, because they’ve left it behind, trailing clouds of brown squirt in the clear water.
Second, they can be ultraselective and highly turned on or off by scent. Mostly off. I’ve repeatedly had them drift up to a fly and then veer away and accelerate as though a skunk had just sprayed them. Was my fly that laughable? Did it smell that bad? That sets the stage for this story, which was really the trigger that has made me a little obsessive about carp. The first carp I caught without snagging or chumming was the real game changer. I caught this fish on a fly, and it has led to those increasing efforts over the last few years. I took it in calf-deep water at Lake Perris, just as the carp were moving into the shallows to spawn. The water was up into the shoreline shrubs, which was a thicket of willows, mule fat, and tamarisk about 12 feet high. Through the jungle of shrub trunks, there were trails. These trails had been created by anglers when this part of the shoreline was dry, and the carp were following these flooded paths, exploring the shallows for likely spawning locations. It was before the sex got wild and muddy, so the water was still clear. Usually, there were little parades of carp — I’m assuming a female or two, followed by three or four suitors. I stood around a lot, watching fish drift past me and around me. If I was still, they didn’t spook. So I watched. It came as a revelation to me to see that many of the carp were actively feeding on water boatmen oaring around in the shallows. For once, I was sure of the food source.
The carp were behaving just as I had seen trout act on the inside of the weed beds at Lake Crowley in the summer when feeding on tiny perch minnows. The carp would cruise very slowly until they saw a boatman, then dart forward and suck it up, then continue cruising. Standing in the thicket of brush, I positioned myself on a cul-de-sac. The carp slid along the main trail, went around the loop, and then back out on the same road. I tried a dozen fly patterns, dipped and twitched in front of the carp. All I did was spook fish.
I decided the problem was finding a fly that acted like a water boatman. I ended up using a size 18 soft hackle tied on a heavy wire hook. I added a piece of one of those floating, scented, artificial salmon egg baits that I carved into a body with my pocket knife. This “body” was pushed up the hook of the fly for a fatter body of the correct color. More importantly, it made the “fly” float — and I don’t think the scent hurt, either. I put a split shot about six inches above the fly. Since there was no room to cast and I was standing next to the trail anyway, I simply swung the fly out into the carp channel. The little fly buoyed up off the bottom, hanging midwater. Then I waited for the next parade of carp to come. When the lead fish was two feet away, I twitched the fly, making it dive down and away from the fish. The carp rushed forward, ate the fly, and I set the hook. That all happened in less time that it took you to read it.
Have you ever set off a cherry bomb sealed in a quart bottle and sunk under the water? Well, you get the idea. There was a frothy eruption and the carp bolted through the flooded shrubs. There were two miracles. First, the fly rod didn’t get broken on the initial run, and second, the 12-pound “tippet” didn’t break during the 10 or so minutes it took me to “land” the fish.
I ended up fighting the fish by hand, wading through the willows after the carp, following the fly line weaving through the brush, having it ripped through my hands twice, hearing my fly reel give up more line in the distance where I’d dropped the outfit in shallow water. I finally caught up to the fish in waist-deep water and tired it as I tugged the fly line toward me. I beamed. I caught this fish fair and square on a fly. The landing may have been a little unorthodox, and the fly, too, but I’ve forgiven myself bigger transgressions. Holding this seven-or-eight-pounder, I realized how much solid muscle and power was wrapped into these fish. This fish was also gorgeous, a richly colored bronze, perfect fins, big scales, eyes darting around, and with that makeshift fly stuck in its tough, underslung lip.
I was giddy. It could be done, and I had done it. Once is not enough, and knowing that once is not enough can make you go places and do things that are counterintuitive.
There is a push by some in the Los Angeles community to restore the Los Angeles River as a wild river (albeit bounded by tall concrete walls so it can’t spill over its banks — ever) and to bring steelhead back to its clear flows. You have to imagine that I’m not snickering at the exorbitant cost and implausibility of that, but good for them. It’s a wonderful goal. Until then, there are carp. Lots of carp, and big ones.
As part of my quest to become a fly angler who can catch carp more than once, I have been reading all manner of tomes on the fish and tucking away anecdotes I hear from fly anglers who can catch carp regularly. Conway Bowman, the mako shark expert out of San Diego, apparently has made catching carp on flies at Lake Hodges a high science. David D’Beaupre, a Bishop-area trout guide, has revealed his dark passion for carp and that he catches them regularly on flies in the Owens Valley. Most recently, I saw a couple of Facebook posts from fly-fishing chum Greg Madrigal, the maker of the lovely Sierra Nets. Greg had been pretty consistently catching carp in the Los Angeles River. OK, maybe “consistently” is too generous a word, but he and his buddies had a couple of good days and rarely were getting skunked. I called and begged to go along on their next trip.
I have to admit that it felt weird to be driving into Los Angeles to go fishing, instead of as far away from the belly of this beast as possible. Leaving at 4:30 a.m., I was still stopped in traffic half a dozen times as normal people commuted to work. I met Greg and his buddies at their secret spot on the Los Angeles River, driving through a neighborhood filled with old Spanish-style homes, palm trees, and jacarandas in bloom. I parked on a street next to the huge berm that created the flood-control channel that held the Los Angeles River. There was a bicycle-and-hiking trail along the top.
I watched the sun come up. There were Canada geese, a mallard hen with 14 ducklings, cinnamon teals, widgeons, and ruddy ducks. A great blue heron stalked the shallows, and a pair of parrots flew overhead. Greg and his buddies, Duane Broadway and Jeff Eichelberger, were talking about carp they had caught and showed me pictures on cell phones. They showed me the big flies they used and spoke of local fly anglers who were tying carp-specific patterns that were garnering local fame with the growing carp crowd. I had nothing to show or to add, so we went fishing. The river flowed under a major road-
way bridge on concrete to prevent erosion. Where the concrete ended, the river had a more natural bottom and split around an island. The long, flat pool was probably five or six feet deep on one side of the island, and there was room for all four of us to fish to the loose schools of carp there. They were all using crawfish-sized flies. I was using something more midge-like. We fished hard for two hours in the main pool closest to where we’d parked and the next big, deep, slow run below it. At one point, I was standing talking to Jeff when a carp cruised up to his fly, examined it with all its senses, and rejected it. When we caught up to Greg, he told of watching a carp vacuuming off a submerged rock, feeding on something. He had a two-fly rig and drifted it up onto the rock ahead of the carp. The carp fed up to the flies, around them, and past them. I’m sure they got a sniff, but not a take. But each of them had at least one solid take during the morning. I had solid spooks.
My legs were sore from hopping around on rocks and slipping and sliding around between them when wading. I sat down on a sandy spot, and Duane waded out of the river and sat down with me. He pointed to a stretch of water we had all fished. He had caught five there in one day not all that long ago. I was a jinx. Or was it something more?
Maybe my lack of success is penance for those early snagging and chumming experiences. Maybe I’m already dead and this is my personal hell.
The Over Sleazy Carp Fly
Matus Sobolic is one of a rapidly growing contingent of Southern California fly anglers who make short pilgrimages to concrete-lined urban rivers and flood-control canals, city and county park lakes with mowed grass up to the edges, and groundwater settling basins. They go to catch carp, big carp, and the sport is blowing up.
Sobolic has been fly fishing for carp only for the past three years, but he knows of 30 to 40 other anglers who have recently become addicted to it, and “they’re all taking their buddies out.” “We’ve all figured out there’s monster fish here, and we’ve got to learn how to catch them,” said Sobolic. “Now there’s a crew of guys who have fallen head over heels for carp.”
So of course, a whole new family of flies has been born for the special conditions and needs of carp anglers. They are blending techniques, adapting patterns, and coming up with innovative solutions so they can consistently catch carp.
Sobolic’s Over Sleazy has become one of the most popular. “My goal with this pattern was to come up with an Egg-Sucking Leech pattern, much like the ones available commercially, but with a tail that had more action than the chenille-tail being used on some variations [and more buoyant than the marabou used on traditional Egg-Sucking Leeches]. I used a combination of a Gilly Bad Bitch with the foam tail of a Trouser Worm, created by Trevor Tanner and an amazing carp fly on its own,” said Sobolic. “It took multiple failed attempts, along with some bathtub testing, to get the fly along with the tail finally to have the action that I wanted. The fly will drop, doing a headstand, and if fished in current, the tail will immediately have lifelike action. If fished in still water, the fly can be hopped along the bottom to get the same action.
“The fly imitates some form of aquatic worm, or an egg, or even the arm — the siphon — of a clam. Either way, it has proven itself on our waters,” said Sobolic.
Hook: CarpPro Gaper or equivalent, size 6 or 8
Bead: Black, 1/8-inch
Thread: Black 3/0 Uni
Body: Egg-colored egg yarn, with a size 14 grizzly hackle wound through the folds
Tail tag on hook shank: Tan chenille.
Extended tail: Fourteen 1/8-inch tan foam discs cut out of a sheet of 3-millimeter foam with a 1/8-inch hole punch. These are threaded onto 3/0 black Uni thread doubled over, with a black 5/32-inch bead tied to the tip to keep the foam from sliding off.
Sobolic likes to tie these in tan because it is visible in the water for the fish and angler, and it can be tied in a wide variety of color combinations. This is a sight-fishing game exclusively.
— Jim Matthews
A Friendly Competition
The Fourth Annual Carp Throwdown at Lake Henshaw in eastern San Diego County will be held on June 13, 2015. This is a catch-and-release carp fly-fishing tournament, and the event is timed to coincide with the grasshopper hatch in the valley, according to cofounder of the event Al Quattrocchi. The fish frequently are taken on surface hopper patterns in this competition.
There are two divisions, wading and boat. The boat division is a two-angler team event, while the wading division is for single anglers. All landed fish are photographed with digital cameras or cell phones next to an official ruler and then immediately released. The greatest total inches of carp caught wins. First fish caught are to be photographed with the time (watch or phone), because in case of ties, the first fish caught is the tiebreaker.
Fishing is from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., followed by an awards ceremony and pot-luck barbecue at 4:30 p.m. For more information, go to http://carpthrowdown.com, call Conway Bowman (cofounder) at (619) 822-6256 or contact him via e-mail at conwayxbowman@gmail.com or Al Quattrocchi at (310) 995-5111 or via e-mail at alq@tornadodesign.la.
— Jim Matthews
Vice on Ice
A number of Southern California’s best and most innovative carp anglers attend the monthly Vice on Ice event held in South Pasadena at the Round Table Pizza in Wagner’s Center, 1127 Fair Oaks Avenue. The event runs from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. the third Thursday of each month. It’s an open round table for fly tyers, sponsored by the Pasadena Casting Club and set up by carp anglers Matus Sobolic and Adrian Uribe.
— Jim Matthews
