CARPTORIOUS: Mission Dumb-Luck Grass Carp Accomplished

I haven't spent much time intentionally targeting grass carp.  Chasing common carp on a fly is a sadistic enough pastime for me thank you very much!  Instead I have taken the basic position that I will probably blind dumb-luck myself into that particular species at some point.

Mission blind-dumb luck grass carp accomplished!  

I was working my way down the inside a long shoreline of cat-tails when I saw a long dark shape laying on the bottom facing the cat-tails in about 8" of water.  I was only about 15 feet away and was able to pitch my fly underhand about 2 feet past its nose, pull it across the top and drop the fly 4" directly in front of the fish.  The response was an immediate ,brutal and extremely un-vegetarian like surge forward to take the fly followed by a massive explosion of 16 lb of grass carp going crazy.

The first natural question is what fly did you catch it on?  Grass carp are primarily vegetarians of course and the answer might surprised you.  Earlier this week Eric at Catch Fly Fishing was inspired to add some Fishskull mini sculpin helmets to my McLuvin and sent me a couple to try out.

Make no mistake about it...this is meat!  No way the grassie mistook this fly for a potato, tofu or even soy burger.  Instead this was what I would call a trigger take where something alive appears in front of a resting grass-carp and they instinctively eat.  This is my fourth grass carp take (the other three came up dry) and all but one of them was similar in nature.  

A little more on the Sculpin Helmet McLuvin.  The mini sized sculpin helmets are pleasingly small but this is still a very heavy carp fly.  At long range you are going to scare every carp within a city block if you try and over-hand cast this fly directly to shallow carp.  If, however, you are working in-close with flipping, lobbing, dragging and dropping type presentations at any depth the weight is perfect.  It will also work out quite well in current and directly presented to deeper (knee deep or deeper) tailers.

In other words, if you know when, where and how to apply a heavy meaty carp fly like this it can be very successful.    Today was when, lake YouGottaBeKiddingThisIsTopSecretShit was where and I certainly know how.  As a result I had one my best carpin day of the year so far, all on the Sculpin Helmet McLuvin.