The Knowledge Webb Diaries: Carp Part 2, The Beginning

When I was a young boy, I frequently used to beg and plead my mother to drop me off at a popular local reservoir so that I could go fishing. My amazing mother has always supported my passion for the outdoors and fishing but naturally would worry about me the entire time after she dropped me off, as only parents can do. It wasn't exactly in a bad neighborhood or anything but there were certainly some characters around. Fishing was always the excuse I used to initially get me out of the house but what I really went on to love was all of the exploration that would inevitably ensue.  I was in sixth grade, twelve years old, and I can still vividly remember my most memorable and first carp fishing experience to date.    

The area surrounding the lake was just large enough and just wild enough to hold some pockets of land that were overlooked by seemingly everyone but me.  Access was a little rough-and-tough due to the overgrown shrubbery, and because of that, many of the ponds surrounding the reservoir were, and still are, well hidden.  (I visited one of them again a few years ago to find it just as I’d last seen it, much to my pleasure)  The reservoir has a popular swim beach surrounded by heavy vegetation along its outer edge.  In periods of high water, a small depression deep in the heavily shrouded fortress of vines and brush would flood, thus creating during draw-down periods a small pond.  The small piece of water was maybe only fifteen yards in width and twenty yards in length; a puddle really. It was here in this jungle pond that I saw my first glimpses of truly big and tangible fish, laid-up in shallow water, surrounded in mystery and impossible for me to catch.

I tried everything that a studious, fishing-obsessed twelve year old could think of to catch these coffin sized fish. At the suggestion of a local bait shop, I tried a berry flavored doughbait, plus the usual worms, spinners, jigs, crankbaits, and even some flies. Nothing worked. It wasn't until I intuitively learned to hunt and stalk these fish that I finally began to catch them. Nowadays, this is what my friends and I call storking. That is, waiting patiently and moving silently with the cunning and speed of a stork waiting for its next meal to swim by, slip up and make a mistake. It’s a game that’s 99% mental and 1% physical, where the more you know about your adversary, the better your outcome and the more frequently that the odds will tip in your favor. And to be perfectly honest, there’s never, ever, a substitute for time spent in the field with your quarry.   

All of this was long before the internet, where access to knowledge of fly fishing for carp was seemingly impossible to find in print, and what you did find was often a very short blurb saying something along the lines of, little is known of fly fishing for carp but their diets include crayfish, minnows, insects and algae among others, where anglers occasionally land them as a bi-catch. You get the idea; virgin territory.  John Gierach has said of this before too, but it’s true. There were some random Dave Whitlock writings here and there (which are phenomenal by the way), but that was really it. This is before Brad Befus, Barry Reynolds and John Berryman (also famed Colorado carp chasers) came out with their popular book, Carp on the Fly in 1997. Fly fishing for carp I imagine to be like tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys back in the 50's, 60's and 70's when guys were still figuring it all out and creating a path for the rest of us to follow. It pleases me greatly to know that there are still opportunities like this to be had in fly fishing.  

Anyways, where was I? Right. There were about half a dozen of these large carp swimming around in a pond that could barely contain them all. It was like watching enormous arapaima in remote Amazon jungle ponds; very Jeremy Wade type shit for a kid of that age. With persistence, a little luck, and my new-found storking skills, I finally managed to hook into one of these large, ghostly fish.

While eating a hot and sweating peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I noticed the fish sipping small piles of milkweed seeds that would occasionally blow off from the surrounding canopy. Being the observant little angler that I was, I jeri-rigged a pod of the seeds to a small baitholder hook using monofilament fishing line as string to fashion them onto my hook. Keep in mind that I was already tying flies at this point, so it wasn't really too out of line for me. I would watch the fish swim in predictable laps to where all I had to do was to time them right and then dangle my “fly” carefully in front of them. I remember the take being slow and deliberate, much like the tarpon that eat fish scraps at Bud n Mary’s marina in Islamorada, Florida. The fish was nearly three feet long and threw massive sprays of water everywhere, making the pond look like a raging ocean of angered waves.

At that time, as an impressionable, young pre-teen, this fish seemed twice as big and was in fact nearly as large as I was. I really do remember it like it just happened yesterday. I can still picture myself holding that sea-monster in my visibly shaking hands, covered in carp slime, fueled with adrenaline, admiring its strength, beauty and aura that surrounded it. I could feel the fishes spirit, our lives forever connected and I never even had to think twice about letting it go (which was very rare for me at that time). We were mutual adversary’s who over time became mutual friends that studied, learned and respected much from each other. To this day, I still have those same feelings when I hold a carp in my still shaking and wet hands.

I wanted to starting writing The Knowledge Webb Diaries because of the lack of authenticity found in cyberspace surrounding fly fishing, and fly fishing for carp. There are those that "fish" for carp, those who don't, and then there are those that carp for fish(ing).

The Knowledge Webb Diaries is written and photographed by Kirk Webb
This is the second in a multi-part series about carp, carp fishing and whatever else I'm inspired by.