Patience and Poling
by
Jake Bleggi
I’ll start from the beginning, in 2016 I was a trout guide on Utah’s Green River below flaming gorge dam on an unexpectedly high water year. The high water made for some of the worst fishing on the river that I can remember, so I had to find something else to fill my time when I wasn’t guiding.
While sitting in the fly shop killing time on my day off, a few guides from another outfitter walked in with pictures of carp they had caught the day prior. I had never really thought about carp on the fly at this point, but it sounded like a blast from how they described it. I got a handful of fly suggestions and they pointed me in the right direction, then I was off.
The unusual high water from that year may have been bad for the river, but it made the muddy flats a carp fisherman’s dream! I slowly snuck on to my first school of carp, made my cast just like the guys in the shop recommended, then the carp slowly turned for the fly, ate it, ran and snapped me off. I was hooked.
Four years down the road—and lots of carp later—the addiction had only grown stronger. We had spent lots of time dialing our local city carp and had figured out every side pond and ditch we could fish.
I wanted to expand my area and learn something new, so I decided to purchase a skiff. I figured with a skiff I could get back into water that nobody had seen or touched. In my mind carp fishing was going to be easy, but I was wrong. Day one on the skiff was rough. It took some time to figure out poling and find the spots that held the most fish, but eventually we seemed to solve both of those problems.
The one problem we could not seem to solve was getting the fish to eat our flies. We were using the same fly that had always produced for us in the past, we left the first day with no luck. We proceeded to return the following two days, but again, no luck. Although, it was almost better that it happened this way. We were struggling so bad to catch a fish that our motivation to crack the code on how to get these fish to eat only grew stronger with each failed attempt.
Eventually we put down the poles and watched the fish. We noticed that later in the day more fish were going into the super shallow muddy water and tailing deep in the mud where we failed time and time again to catch them. We showed up a little earlier the next day and poled the skiff in deeper water and we found fish in deeper, clearer water cruising for the first time. After a few casts on a couple groups we came tight. It was easily the most rewarding carp I had ever caught because I knew the amount of work I put into it to make that catch possible.
Learning the habits of the carp and trying to figure out this new area proved to be as fun as the fight of the fish and reminded me why I fell in love with carp in the first place.
Thanks for taking the time to read my introduction here, I hope to be back with a follow up blog in the not too distant future. Until then, I wish you much success with your fishing…
Jake Bleggi