This weekend is the annual Johnny Boyd Carp Classic on Blackfoot Reservoir.  The tourney is a fundraiser for a fly fishing industry person in need.  This year it’s for fishing guide Travis Rydberg who was in a car accident 18 months ago.  This is a fly fishing only tourney that has gone on for 15 years.  I have missed only one and that’s because I was fishing for mahseer in Bhutan.

I’m not going to lie; this is one of my favorite events of the year.  Yes, I get to fish carp, but most importantly I see a ton of friends that I only see a couple times a year.  We fish together, eat together and share a couple orange whips around the fire too.

There are 30 three man teams.  My teams name is “Could Be Worse” and has consisted of Ben Smith, Trey Scharp and myself.  Last year Trey backed out last minute and this year he can’t make it either.  Hopefully Trey can make the dates work again eventually but for this year we have a new addition, Trevor Wine.  Trevor is one of my Victor buds and he’s a guide for WorldCast Anglers.

Ben can’t get up to Blackfoot until late tonight but Trevor and I headed to Blackfoot today to practice fish and arrived before noon.  We stopped for our first look off the highway expecting to see fish but there were none.  It’s probably a good thing because it gave me time to realize I didn’t have my Idaho fishing license yet.

That led us to Soda Springs which is only 15 miles from Blackfoot.  I got my license and then we decided to fish the small carp lake on the edge of town.  We parked at my favorite spot and rigged up and headed into the tall grass around its edges.

There were carp but the lake was high and other than ones literally in the shallow water and weeds where you couldn’t cast to them, they were hard to see.  I waded out to a spot I know they pass by often and made some short casts with a crayfish pattern.  To my surprise I landed a smallmouth bass.

That smallie wouldn’t be my only one.  I went on the catch a dozen of the chubby bass.  And I do mean chubby.  They were obese!  Apparently they’ve taken hold in this lake do to the abundance of crayfish.

It was nice to bust up some smallies even though they were small.  But it was carp we were after so Trevor and I moved to a shallow area of the lake where I suspected we could spot a few mirror carp regardless of the high water.  Sure enough there were a ton.  But they proved not as easy to catch as they looked.

Out of hundreds of passing carp I only saw a couple actually feeding.  They were sucking grass on the lakes edge.  The rest were swimming along chasing one another.  I believe carp spawn more often than most fish but spring is their official spawning time.  Most were not hungry for anything.

Trevor and I fought hard to catch a few.  I landed three all which were around 5-8lbs.  Trevor landed one.  These fish we caught all came on different flies so we learned nothing as far as “cracking the code”.

We headed back to Blackfoot Reservoir around 5 PM to look at a few more places then set up camp.  There are already a few teams here.  All are here to claim a good camp and practice before the event.

Trevor and I had brats planned for dinner but my great friends Gary and Leslie Green along with Marty and Janet Downy had different plans.  They invited us to their camp and fed us barbecue ribs and a heap of delicious snacks.  It’s so good to hang with old friends especially before a spectacular Blackfoot Reservoir sunset!

Jeff Currier Global Fly Fishing