Fly Fishing Idaho's Secret Waters by Chris Hunt

Author:Chris Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Cameron Hunt admires a big carp pulled from southern Idaho’s Snake River.

These Asia natives will start to spawn in earnest around the first of June and continue for a few weeks, concluding in July. They’ll remain on the flats—or move back and forth from deeper water to feed—throughout the summer.

The attraction of carp on the river’s flats—at least to me—is that they behave a lot like treasured saltwater fish. They tail and root around for crustaceans, just like redfish. They cruise in hungry pods, just like bonefish. And they can be incredibly selective, like permit. Like all of the above, carp are strong, fast fish prone to reel-whistling runs and shattered graphite.

And, of course, I don’t have to spend a small fortune or two days’ worth of travel time to get to the places they swim.

No, the backwater flats of Snake River aren’t the crystalline flats of the Bahamas, but they possess their own beauty, one that’s grown on me over time. The lava bluffs overlooking the green waters of the Snake take my breath away every time I lay eyes on them. And to drive along the river and see these massive invaders—sometimes pushing thirty pounds—breaching the frothy surface is a treat only an angler willing to expand his fishy horizons can appreciate.

I remember that as a kid living in suburban Denver, carp were really the only fish I could dependably catch within range of my banana-seat bicycle or the soles of my sneakers. Using bread dough concocted in my mother’s kitchen and sunk to the bottom of the lake at Stern Park, carp prodded my imagination and scratched that fishy itch until I could find a ride with my grandfather into the Colorado high country to chase brookies, browns and rainbows in the cold, clean water of the Rockies.

Today, convincing them to hit a fly is much more challenging than snoozing on the bank and waiting for one to suck in a dough ball past the barbels. And—perish the thought!—I honestly believe that for sheer pleasure, I’d rather latch into a carp on the flats than I would the average trout.

Blasphemy? For a trout purist, certainly. But for a wandering fly fisher with an itch to experiment, no. That’s not to say there’s no guilt involved. It’s hardly an altruistic endeavor, chasing carp on the fly.

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