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