Carping from a Kayak

 

Carp on the Kayak – or “poor man’s free-range fish-farming”

by Richard deCosta

I was introduced to carp angling via the British mini-series, A Passion for Angling, and was enchanted by the charm of the small farm-pond setting, and the quaint and quiet ways of its hosts. What I discovered when I set out to have my own bit of quaint and quiet carp angling was anything but quaint: the mighty Kennebec river. I now fish for carp almost exclusively in Merrymeeting Bay and its tributaries.

Taking a rest on the side of the Kennebec River

Carp are a highly underrated game fish in Maine. They’re a coarse fish, and from away, but then again, so are some of our favorite summer visitors! Carp aren’t just visiting fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on which side of the invasive species fence you’re on). Despite efforts to the contrary, they’re pretty much here to stay.

And my favorite way to catch carp is from a kayak. A small one. When you latch onto a 30 pound fish from a 7 foot kayak, it’s an event! If you’re not well anchored, it’s the perfect poor man’s trolling motor, so long as you don’t mind making a beeline for the weeds every time you turn it on!

Since their introduction in the 1890’s they have spread to quite a few places in Maine, but the spot with the highest carp ratio I’ve found is in and around Merrymeeting Bay, particularly in the tidal flats around the south end of Swan Island. Truth be told though, nearly any stretch of flats in the lower Kennebec watershed will usually yield some carp. Swan Island just happens to have great camping facilities, so I tend to prefer that area. You can put your kayak or small boat in right at the public launch in Richmond. If you’re camping at Swan Island, Maine IF&W offers a shuttle service that comes with the daily fee.

Swan Island campground’s dock in Richmond

Camping at Swan Island

The first step, of course, is finding feeding carp (if they’re not feeding, they won’t go for what you're offering, no matter how ambrosial or well-presented it may be), and being there at the right time. This means positioning yourself near, or possibly in, a patch of grass in the flats during the last two to three hours of flood tide, and staying there for the first two to three hours of ebb tide. For a visual guide, as long as there is at least 8-10” of water on the flats, they’ll be there somewhere. The shallower the water, the easier they are to spot, especially from a low-sitting kayak.

High tide on Swan Island flats

Once you find a likely spot for carp, you need to know what to look for to find feeding carp. Their feeding and other behaviors have been given names by anglers over the years: tailers, rooters, mudders, cloopers, cruisers, and hellraisers, to name a few. For bait fishing under the surface you’ll want to find the tailers, rooters, and mudders. These are the ones foraging in the silty, muddy bottom in and around the grass.

They leave unmistakable signs as to their location: gradually expanding and travelling silt clouds, blades or clumps of grass moving in a way unlike their neighbors (this is the carp moving between stalks, rooting around them), bubbles rising from disturbed silt, and the most obvious, big ole carp tails sticking up out of the water while the business end points down into the trough.

A sure sign of feeding carp: A slowly expanding cloud of silt

Cloopers can be the most fun, since they rise up and ‘cloop’ the food off the surface. This is where a hooked, floating bait is the most lethal. It’s also where using a fly rod for carp is most effective.

Let’s talk a bit about preparation. If you are fly fishing for carp, locating feeding fish and positioning yourself where you can see and reach them is usually enough. If you are fishing with any kind of bait, you’ll want to do some pre-baiting of the area you’re going to be fishing. 

A word of caution about this: pre-baiting or advance baiting, that is, depositing meat, bones, dead fish or other food material in the water to lure fish, is not allowed in any freshwater body regulated by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, so do not do it! The reason you can pre-bait in Merrymeeting Bay (and the tidal waters of its tributaries) is that they are not regulated by the IF&W, but rather the Maine Department of Marine Resources, and they allow it. They are the ones that issue saltwater licenses and handle anything that is not freshwater. I have verified on the phone with a DMR official that pre-baiting is allowed in the locations I am advocating.

I could, and probably will at some point, write an entire article on the ways and means of effective pre-baiting for carp, but for the sake of the brevity let me give you the basics. Essentially what you are attempting is short-term, low-budget, highly inefficient, free-range fish farming. The goal is to freely offer (place in the water, no strings attached) that which will be your hook bait in the area you have selected. Do this regularly for hours, days, or even weeks in advance of when you expect to catch them. The idea is to create a “safe” and regular food source for your quarry, so that when you come along ready to lead them to the aquatic abattoir, they will not be nearly as suspicious as evolution would have prefered them to be. You bear hunters will likely be nodding in agreement at this tactic.

There is also the theory that the more free food you offer at one time, the more likely the carp are to compete for the apparent abundance, and in doing so, let their guard down and clamp on to the bait that has a shiny, pointed, hook-shaped tail. 

As for what bait is most effective in catching carp, the answer is simple: smelly, tasty food. They do have a sweet tooth (well, sweet lips), but the more nutritious the bait the better, since they won’t keep coming back for empty calories. Carp will eat sweet corn, boilies (generally a cereal/flour/sugar mix, balled up and boiled), premade catfish bait (carp bait isn’t as readily available in the U.S. as it is in the U.K.), worms, sandwich meat, and even dog food. Boilies are most popular with British anglers for advance baiting, and they should know. They’ve been catching carp a lot longer than we’ve even had them. I like to make my own boilies and make them big, at least an inch or more in diameter. I’m not the least bit interested in growing the local yellow perch and smallmouth bass populations.

A small batch of homemade flour and Wheaties boilies

A selection of carp baits: two flavors of boilies and sweet corn

Since the point of all this is to catch carp from a kayak, let me fill you in on some other essentials: two anchors, one fore and one aft, and a periscope. A periscope is most important when you are really low to the water, except in the case of tailing or clooping carp. Anything going on below the surface will need to be spotted from a distance, and from high enough to see through the reflections. Edu Science makes a nice collapsible periscope for about $30.

Two anchors are essential, especially if you are using only the mushroom type. With a 20-30 pound carp on the line and a slick, silty bottom, you will slide; maybe not out to sea, since the carp will not be able to go quite that far, but if you have just one mushroom, you will move! It’s best to anchor yourself (well before you actually make your first cast) with at least one plow or fluke-style anchor on either end of the kayak. With no anchors, you might as well get off the kayak and stand in the silt (snowshoes, anyone?), because a carp of any decent size will take you on a magical sleigh ride. Even a mere five-pound bass can easily move a good sized canoe!

So assuming you’ve got it all set up right up til this point, and you’ve just hooked a decent 20+ pounder, make sure you’ve good a sturdy net to haul it into the kayak with you. It’s not a graceful thing, having a fish-cow in your lap in a kayak, but it can be quite fun to see just how much fish you are capable of landing in such a small craft!

My Carp Story

 

My Carp Story

or, the making of an angling anglophile

by Richard deCosta

I have been in love with the British way of fishing ever since I first watched “A Passion for Angling”. It is to anglers what The Joy of Painting is to artists, with the quiet, easy narration of Bernard Cribbins, whom, I later discovered had appeared in several of my favorite British TV shows, and to my composer’s ears the completely British sound of Jennie Muskett’s graceful and flowing musical score. To this day when I listen to composers like Elgar and Butterworth, I am unwittingly transported to the lush and overgrown, so far yet so familiar banks of Redmire Pool in Herefordshire, England. I have never been there, not in person, but I am sure I would know it if I stumbled upon it, as I have in my dreams.

It’s not just the setting of the show that is so inviting, it’s the wholeness of the fishing experience that is conveyed in the program. Passionate anglers Chris Yates and Bob James spend nearly as much time quietly watching birds, making polite conversation, writing, napping and brewing tea on the bank as they do actually going after fish. Add to that the fact that England has several species of fish that we don’t have here in Maine, which are so charming and so dear to them that it doesn’t matter that they are small. “What a beautiful rudd,” they’ll say with a smile, “must be nearly a half a pound!” Charming.

At the end of the day, however, what they are really after are carp. Not specifically a British fish, nor even European, but by the way I was introduced to them by Chris and Bob (via the telly, of course) on the banks of Redmire, carp feel British to me, and I adore them. Sedentary and slow, plump and frumpy, they are the antithesis of that darling of Maine anglers, the holy brook trout. Carp are from away, you see, and most real anglers look down on them (don’t you know they’re bottom feeders? Well, so are lobsters, my friend). The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife barely acknowledges their existence, and then only in passing, not for a moment considering that they might be anything other than an invasive species.

I, too, was guilty of having a kind of intellectual blind spot to them for a time. For two full years after I first experienced (second hand) carp angling and Redmire it did not occur to me that carp might live somewhere other than Merrie Olde England. For some reason I assumed that they only existed over there, and sighed the sigh of the broke anglophile who will probably never actually visit those waters, let alone fish them.

Once I cleared the fog from my brain and actually looked, I discovered that we too have carp, right here in Maine! The Kennebec River, including Merrymeeting Bay and its tributaries, are loaded with carp!

Now, according to most accounts, especially early ones, carp are a hard fish to catch. Some would say impossible, and for that reason not worth the bother. Countless angling journals, books, magazine articles, and TV shows over the last few decades have proven this untrue. They can be caught if you know how. And once you do have one on the line, hold on, they fight like mad! It’s hard enough to catch carp on a farm pond where everything pretty much stays where it is from one minute to the next (except for the carp of course), but here, on the south end of the mighty Kennebec River, its tidal water, so things are in constant motion. This also limits the amount of time you have in the course of a day to fish for carp (or anything else). Meaning that you only get a crack at catching one for only a few hours twice a day, and the clock is always ticking.

Over the last couple of years I’ve built up a private fantasy about the kind of carp fishing I’d be doing in Maine. This is before I leaned where they lived, of course. It went something like this: In the early morning I would set out on my motorcycle, laden with fishing and camping gear as it so often is, ride out to the country, perhaps to Millinocket inland, or Bucksport on the coast, park the bike by the side of a small farm pond, set up camp, scatter some boilies (a cereal/flour/sugar mix, balled up and boiled) in the water to spur the carp’s appetite and start to earn their trust, set up a couple rods and while away a lazy hour or so making tea on the bank until one of my floats got pulled under. I would then have a jolly good scrape with a lusty 20-pounder, which I would eventually coax into my net, admire lovingly on the bank, then gently ease back into the water. “Well, isn’t this nice,” I’d say, just like the British do.

Turns out carp fishing in Maine isn’t nearly so quaint. I said they were to be found in the Kennebec River. This is fine, and rivers can be charming, but to paint a clearer picture, the Kennebec is about as far removed from an English farm pond as it is possible to be. The Kennebec River, especially around Merrymeeting Bay is grand, majestic, important. In a word, huge. At times, when paddling from one fishing spot to another, possibly miles apart, on this great river, I’d encounter wide stretches walled with tall pines and birches, with eagles overhead and great leaping sturgeon on all sides, I feel like a latter-day Lewis and Clark, off to explore a continent. The feeling overall is one of immensity, of grandeur.

And so I have modified my carp angling worldview to suit the reality of where I live, where they live. I can now be quite happy paddling my kayak for miles in the strong currents and eddies, waiting for the tide to bring the carp into the wide, grassy tidal flats where they feed on the plants, insects and crustaceans that live there in abundance. It is there, gently anchored in these calm edge waters that I sit and enjoy a riparian snack of homemade beef jerky and black instant coffee, watching the large fishing vessels head out to sea. It’s not England, it’s not Redmire, it’s Merrymeeting Bay, and I love it. I’ve never been much of a tea drinker anyway.

June, 2015
Buxton, Maine

Minimalism in Fly Fishing

by Richard deCosta

The first time I went fishing with a 6-piece fly rod was quite an eye-opener for me. It was a Cabela's 7'6" Stowaway and it collapsed down to just 15 inches including the case. The idea was to have a rod I could easily pack into one of my motorcycle's saddlebags along with a couple of reels and fishing gear.

What I purchased was a starter kit, but it was the reel I was after. Being a kit, it came with nearly everything a budding fly fisherman would need: rod and reel of course, but also accessories like leader, tippet, floatant, a small fly box, a leader straightener, forceps and nippers, all of which fit into a small chest pack. Since I was only after the reel, I put the rod on the rack, stored the chest pack somewhere in a drawer (more on that in a bit), and stuffed the extra gear into my already bulging fly vest. 

The first couple of outings went fairly well. I stowed the 6-piece rod in its case into one of the saddlebags along with a collapsible net, reel case and overstuffed vest, which I rolled as best as such a lumpy thing can be rolled. I rode/hiked to the river, caught fish, came home. Good deal.

This system lasted for a couple of trips until one particularly bright day in mid-June. I had ridden the bike to a remote spot, and parked it at the end of a 5-mile dirt road. After unpacking the gear from the saddlebag, I donned the ceremonial garb of the fly fisherman. Boonie hat, vest, waders and polarized glasses. I then hiked another 2 miles through the woods to my starting point on the river.

Once out on the water, I discovered to my great chagrin that I was without my flybox. I know I had put it in one of the big front pockets of my vest. But had I zipped it? I could picture it in my mind, not zippered. So there I was, all dressed up and ready to go, but with no flies- wait, not no flies. At a quick glance I saw I had six or seven flies that were still clinging to the drying patch on my vest!

A few moments of alternate cursing and pondering led me to conclude that it was better to fish with the flies that I had rather than to walk a 4 mile-round trip to get my fly box. After a final curse, I took a closer look at the flies I had: a parachute Adams, a large gnat, a small, dark woolly bugger, gold-ribbed hare’s ear and pheasant tail nymphs, an elk-hair caddis, a warden’s worry, and a small grasshopper (it was midsummer).

As it turned out, it proved to be one of the most enjoyable and productive day’s fly fishing I have ever had. It was surprising and perplexing at the time, but looking back, it makes perfect sense.

Knowing I had only these few flies, I fished much more slowly, deliberately, selectively than I ever had before. I hoarded my casts, waiting and debating, and when deciding to cast to (or not) a spot, casting with much more deliberation and care. Once I had a fish on, I played it with much more focused attention than I ever did when I knew I had flies by the dozen waiting if I broke one off.

I also realized that although I was (as at the time I thought) under-stocked in the fly department, I was quite over-stocked in every other area. For instance, I have read my stream thermometer exactly twice, and one of those times only because I happened to have dropped it by accident into the stream.

By the time the sun had gone down, I had caught nearly twenty beautiful brook trout ranging from 5” to 17”, and had all but two flies still remaining; my woolly bugger having been snagged and lost on a rock or log, and the Adams broken off on what would have been the largest brookie of the day.

Next morning, I took a careful look at my gear- nearly all of it, spread out on the kitchen table. Based on the previous day’s success, I divided my gear into three groups.

In the first, the absolute essentials: fly rod, reel, leader, two sizes of tippet, and fly box (to be sorted later). I debated putting my landing net in this group, but concluded that for brook trout fishing at least, I didn’t need it, as I almost always released the fish without ever removing them from the water.

In the second, important gear: waders, boots, hat, several sizes and types of leaders, fly floatant, forceps, water bottle, and landing net.

In the third, nice-to-haves: multiple (6+ sizes) of tippet, two boxes of nymphs and streamers (totalling over 120 flies between them), and a box of miscellaneous files, including terrestrials, worms, and other oddities. Other items also made it into this group, like the fly vest itself, bug spray, creel and minimal streamside cooking gear (I do get hungry on occasion).

By this point I could see that the “fly fishing vest” was nothing more than part of a fly fisherman Halloween costume. I set it aside and picked up the small starter-kit chest pack. It’s only about 6” on a side, but the items from the essentials group fit into it easily, minus the rod. Then, taking the small starter-kit fly box, chose 12-pair of what I consider to be essential trout flies. I would later add three more ‘essential’ boxes, one each for panfish, bass, and carp. For those curious about what my trout box contains, just google ‘top trout flies’, and you’ll get more suggestions than you could imagine.

Over the last three seasons, I have honed down the list to be even more compact. I no longer bring waders, unless the water is cold, using my motorcycle boots and discreetly changing into swim shorts I kept in the saddlebags in the bushes. The boots would be dry within five miles of my departure to home at the end of the day.

It is a very liberating way to fish, both spiritually and economically. It is quite a contrast to when I go out on my 16’ Old Town, which is so equipped to be very nearly a floating Orvis dealer. 

Feb. 27, 2022
Saco, Maine