Summertime is Carptime

They are ugly, they live in dirty places.

But guess what...they are EVERYWHERE, and they love eating flies

Summertime is rough for Ohio anglers.  The trout typically need a break with hot water temps and dwindling flows.  The Smallmouth, while still good targets, are not the pissed off fly smashing death machines they were a few months ago (and will be in a few months from now).  The local Muskie slow down and start to sulk, suspending, reluctant to chase, even if the fly you are chucking has a Mercury outboard strapped to it and it plays death metal as it whizzes by their head.

Sure, theres always ponds, and bucket mouth willing to murder a frog pattern or a big fat mouse,  or bluegills that are more than eager to take slow stripped buggers on the 2 wt, but even these summertime favorites shut down in the middle of the day, when the weather is gorgeous and you just want to be out chucking feathers.

So what is an angler to do?  Well, you know who's eating this time of year, right when the sun is highest and the air warmest?  You guessed it.  The White Trash Bonefish, the tough fighting Asian import we call the Carp.

Fly fishermen, I think, are romantics.  Poets and artists at heart.  We will literally romanticize anything.  Carp are no exception.  "The Golden bone", the "Golden Ghost" etc. etc.  We will talk all day about how hard they are to catch, or how spooky they are, or how selective.  We are also prone to hyperbole.  We tend to make things sound much harder than they actually are.

I have buddies that will just flat out ignore carp all together, even when they run into a pod of 20 pounders tailing away on the river.  I can't count how many times this conversation has happened after regrouping at the car:

Me:  "Hey you get anything?"
Buddy:  "Naw, didn't see anything, just a bunch of carp"

And why don't they fire a few at those fish?  Well, they think it's too hard, or they don't have the right fly, or they just don't see them as game fish.

All of that, in my opinion, is bullshit.  Carp are not pretty, and they also are not insanely hard to catch.  They aren't particularly good at hiding, they aren't particularly elusive, and they will eat flies you can tie with the scraps from your fly tying bench.  They literally tell you everything you need to know about them just with unbelievably transparent body language.  Hell, when they are happy, they basically have a giant neon sign above them that screams "IM OVER HERE!  CAST TO ME! CAST TO ME!"

Sure, they can sometimes be selective, and sometimes finding those happy carp is difficult, and you need to be a semi-decent caster, but at the end of the day carp are three things:  everywhere, nearly always chowing down, and they are pretty easy to locate in any body of water.

Oh, and they are fuckin' strong.  Like tying your line to a pitbull's collar then throwing his favorite tennis ball kind of strong.

Toss in the fact that they eat when it's hot enough to melt soft metals,  it's pretty much all sight fishing, they gobble up flies, and can show your backing some sunlight or break a rod every once and a while, and what you have is the perfect summer fly rod fish.

So if it's nasty hot out, and you think nothing is biting, think again. Go get your 6-8wt, some 1x fluoro, tie on a wiggly little fly, and start chucking to these big bastards.  Stash a half dozen carp flies in every freshwater fly box you have, just in case, because you never know when you are going to stumble on a pack of fat ass stupid happy fish grubbing like they are getting paid for it.

...but make sure that backing knot that has never seen the light of day is strong.