Sight Fishing Rocks

It just fricking rocks hard. I hain't been out fishing much lately, being that there is a lot going on around here. I never did report on the last couple times out though. Here is a summary statement regarding said instances: sight fishing for carp just kicks ass. Both of my last two outings were very short, and each produced only one fish... but that was enough.

#1: I was skulking around a carp flat and I spotted a nice fish out a ways... I ninja crept it down the slope and started to cast to the fish, only to find that after I dropped to the level of the water, two smaller carp came into my sight - just 6-8 feet away feeding under a shrub overhang. I forgot about the fish in the distance and cane-poled the fly in the face of one of the nearby fish... kind of spooked and said "screw that buddy" and just slowly turned away from it... I put the fly in the cone of sight of the second fish though, and I was able to watch like it was on TV: the carp slowly dipped its head, flared mouth open and set mouth down on top of fly... wow. I was so crushed by the imagery I could barely bring myself to set the hook. I did though, and the fish took off like a bat out of hell 40+ feet downriver and broke me off. I can 100% honestly tell you that I didn't care about losing that fish. I've got the image. Later on I did sight fish to and land a different fish of similar size, but the take was observed from a distance so the drama was not as high.

#2: I was walking a high bank of a big river and there weren't many fish to be seen. I found two in a big ol' mass of trees, and I was actually considering casting to them even though I was guaranteed to break them off immediately... I just wanted to see if I could fool them I guess. Finally I saw a tail and focused on it for a while... head came into view and I was only 8 feet away up high on the bank... I snaked my fly rod through the long grass and simply dropped a swimming clouser right in front of the fish. I kid you not - that carp back-ferried a little with its pelvic fins, looked down at the fly and basically said "holy cow, look at that morsel - I'm going to pound that down!" I watched the head dip, mouth flare open... set the hook and it was on. In the big river with small 4 wt a 4 lb fish puts up a pretty good fight. I couldn't resist the grip-n-grin photo - there was the face of the bank sitting there just perfect for me to place the camera on it like a shelf. I had to apply some pretty good pressure to keep that fish out of the logs.

So you tell me: would you rather set a tip-up or a bobber out and blindly catch a fish, or sight, stalk and fool fish? Even thinking about Buffalo Days... I can say that is more fun to sight fish to 5 lb fish than to blind fish to 15 lbers.