Does Elvis Even Fly Fish For Carp?

Is that CarpFoot.  Nah.  Elvis?  Nope.  That is actually the equally legendary Barry Reynolds being butchered by my limited camera skills.  Well, legendary for us couple thousand weirdo's I guess.  At any rate, Barry and I got out for a couple of hours on Saturday and I was hoping to get some action shots of him landing a carp. 

Picture by me.  Sucks.

What can I say, I like to collect crappy fuzzy pictures of my carpin heroes in action.  You laugh now, but my collection will be worth tens of dollars when I am dead.

It was a really fun outing though.  Barry and I both caught a carp and had a couple more on between us in limited time which feels like redemption for our Carp Slam pairing four years ago.  Ancient history perhaps, but we got very thoroughly skunked.  Barry just doesn't get the offer that often and frankly neither do I these days so it was nice to get a reset.  I also got to see Barry's latest direction on carp flies for the DSP and I think it is seriously on the mark.  Unfortunately with the slam coming in less than a month it is also probably top-secret!

My favorite moment of the day was when Barry looked at me, smiled wryly and said "Looks like your in a pickle".  We were fishing from a bridge in order to get around early morning low-light combined with off-color water.  I had misinterpreted or more likely just ignored his plan for how we were going to land a fish if we hooked up because his plan really only applied to the downriver side of one end of the bridge.  Unfortunately I was on the upriver side of the wrong end of the bridge.  As a result I was fifteen feet above the river and 10 above the bank with guide wires extending upriver 30 feet to either side of me and no apparent way down.  Combine that with a decently sized (low teens-ish?) and angry carp running furiously down-river in heavy current on 2x tippet and while landing the carp was in question, so was the future of my new (for me) Sage VT2 rod.

I worked it out.

Picture by Barry Reynolds.  Doesn't suck.

It turns out that an old Salmon / Steel-head trick I had almost forgotten about works for carp too.  Give a fish running hard downriver a little slack or light pressure and sometimes they will turn back upriver on their own.  After that is was just a matter of temporarily handing Barry my rod and ignoring the fact that I am no longer a whipper-snapper.  Climbing over the edge and hanging from the bottom of a bridge so that the drop goes from 10 feet to 4 feet is after all whipper-snapper territory!

Incidentally, if you want Barry to show you the non-idiotic way to hook a carp from a bridge or anywhere else for that matter he happens to be guiding carp on the South Platte with Trouts Fly-shop these days.