In a Slump

The year 2006 has a long way to go before it makes any headway as one of my better fishing years. The rains didn’t come when I needed them for my winter steelheading, and I got my boat in the water the day before they cut off the spring salmon season. We managed to get skunked twice before they told us the sturgeon quota was met (none of my buddies filled any tags), a really good clamming season was cut short with some sort of contamination, and I couldn’t even manage to catch a planted trout.

With the notable exception of a few good days of surf fishing for red-tailed perch, and a productive trip to Lost Lake resort, I’ve pretty well been shut out!

What do you do when you get on a streak like that? Well, if you have enough money and time, you take off for Cabo and catch yourself a few really nice fish. I recently got an e-mail from my buddy Gene. He took his two boys down to Cabo San Lucas to celebrate his oldest boy’s graduation. They nailed a really nice marlin and picked up a good tan.

My buddy Jim headed up to Alaska and did a little guiding in a river above Anchorage. He managed to boat about 30 fish a day for himself and his clients. They caught three flavors of salmon and a few trout and Dolly Vardens as well. His arm hurt so bad that he had to take aspirin at night, poor guy!

Even my buddy Milford took a trip up to British Columbia for a week of red-hot fishing. Unfortunately, he took his luck with him! The lakes had gotten a little too warm, and the trout bite went down to nothing. All that driving and the smell of skunk still permeated his fishing vest!

Down to Carping
Things had gotten so bad that the two of us hiked in to my fishing pal Jeff’s slough near Young’s Bay to try and catch a few carp and get our spirits up. As you know, I’ve always enjoyed the tussle that the sucker mouthed “goldfish” offer and we needed to try a little “fishing in a barrel” to get our confidence up. No way would we try any of those big-eyed brutes for dinner, but catching is catching, and we needed a few hookups to buoy our spirits.

Milford and I got our gear, a can of worms and our lunches and headed out for a bright afternoon of carping. The water was properly murky and, with the sun shining overhead, we could see the big fish finning in the grass-filled waterway. Carefully working our worms onto our hooks, we threw our bait and bobbers into the warm soup. The fish worked around our bait, sniffed the bottom and even pushed our bobbers around with their noses but nothing would bite our worms. This was driving us nuts, not a nibble for two hours of effort.

Finally I had enough of this abuse, and we called Jeff on the cell phone. “Hey Turkey,” I whined. “Why don’t your fish bite?” Jeff had a good laugh and gave us a tip. “I always caught more on bread that anything else,” he advised.

Fun Spoiled
Well heck, we still had a sandwich or two left over. We wadded up the toast, spit on it, and baited up our hooks. As soon as the bobbers hit the water, we were in business. The big gold carp loved that stuff. We had an hour of red-hot action and pulled in and released a couple of dozen carp. Finally we ran out of lunch to share with the fish and started packing up our gear.
As we got ready to leave, a young fellow paddled by in his kayak. “Have any luck?” he asked. With a smile of satisfaction, Milford replied that we’d hooked a lot of fish, not being any more specific, lest we be seen as carp poachers. “I just live a couple of houses away,” the paddler explained. “The water’s been a little high for bass since May, but I’ll bet you’ve been driven nuts by the carp. The guy next door throws bread to them every morning, and they swarm anything that hits the water”.

Without further comment we slunk back to the car in shame. Who knows, maybe the salmon will come in heavy this fall. If not I may take up knitting!

Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and rvlife.com.