Short Afternoon Carp Session

When I go carp fishing, I prefer to make a day out of it. It's been my experience that an hour or two is not enough time to catch carp and make it worthwhile to dig out all the equipment, drive to the spot, set up and fish. (There's something to be said for traveling light and I'm going to be working on a strategy for that over the winter months.) But yesterday I scheduled a vacation day in the afternoon and headed out anyway.

I got my first fish within 15 minutes of casting out and it took 3 1/2 hours to get 3 more (in a 20 minute span) for a total of 4 in a few minutes past 4 hours before I had to go and the rain rolled into the area. I would have stayed another 45 minutes or so, but I had an appointment and had to go.

Here are some pictures:

This one was kind of a blooper. A passer-by agreed to take some pictures for me, but the fish had other plans.

This is the same fish once I wrangled him into position.
I may have been the best dressed fisherman in America yesterday. As you can tell from my button down shirt, I came straight from work stopping just long enough to change shoes and pull on some rain pants to protect my pants.

The first fish caught me by surprise.
I hadn't finished setting up and as you can tell didn't have a good strategy for self-timer pictures yet either.

When fishing alone, sometimes you have to get creative with ways to take pictures.
I snapped this one in the net.

I'm not sure about the facial expression, but I enjoyed catching the fish.

Another fish; another picture in the net.

I am convinced that carp move around in shoals of 5 or 6 fish (maybe more). Many times I have waited hours for a fish and then caught multiple fish in short succession. When they do decide to move on the bait, it's game time.

Two of these fish never sounded the alarm, so it pays to watch the rods pretty close. Yesterday it may have made the difference between 2 fish and 4 fish. Sometimes it could mean the difference between no fish and a single fish. One's certainly better than none every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Overall it was a good day. I'll take days like this as the season turns colder. Fishing days are going to end in a week or two for me.

I don't have any spots where the water stays warm. A warm water discharge would be nice. Drop me a note in the comments if you know of any warm water spots that have open water year-round.