Growing up near Cleveland, Ohio, in its heyday as a major polluter, I saw a lot of carp.
I would catch one everyone once in a while while fishing for smallmouth bass in Lake Erie or some of the local rivers.
We always let them go because carp were considered trash fish.
We didn’
t eat them for the same reason, and that was probably a good decision not because carp are bad to eat, but because the waters around Cleveland were loaded with industrial chemicals back then.
There were so many in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River that it used to catch fire. A major blaze there led to creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the nation’s Clean Water Act.
I mention all that because it took me a while to get my head around why Jim Pankiewicz of Bothell is so passionate about fly fishing for carp.
Then I saw some of the brutes he’s been catching in the Columbia River. They’re some big strong fish.
“Fly fishing for carp can be very, very frustrating,” he said. “You can walk for hours and not see a fish. You can see good numbers of fish that aren’t interested in eating even real bugs. You can see feeding fish who want nothing to do with your fly.
“Because it is all sight fishing, it can be absolutely riveting,” he added. “It is so engaging to stalk feeding fish, cast to them, and detect takes visually. The fish are smart, wary, big, strong and they will take a fly.”
A retired marketing teacher at Marysville-Pilchuck High School , Pankiewicz gets to fish a little more often from his “carp shack” on the Columbia. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m certain its not a shack.
He also writes a blog about fly fishing for carp that you can visit by Clicking here
I highly recommend that you check out Jim’s blog. He’s a teacher by nature and a thoughtful, articulate angler, so his posts are interesting and helpful.
While people like me may not give carp their due as a sport fish, there are many others who do.
Jim told me he his blog has been visited by people from 49 states and Canada, Russia, Latvia, Malaysia, Germany, Brazil and many other countries.
By the way, he said he caught the carp pictured with a Size 8 Carp Carrot of his own design. He said the fish was tailing in shallow water, meaning it was feeding on the bottom and sticking its tail up.
“I love fly fishing, but I especially love fly fishing for carp,” he said.
I addition to sharing information on his blog, Pankiewicz is national fly fishing director of the Carp Anglers Group and fly fishing editor for North American Carp Angler magazine in which he writes a column called The Last Cast.
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