It was a cold, drizzly and rainy night after I crawled in my Explorer last evening. I’m on Blackfoot Reservoir doing some reconnaissance before the Johnny Boyd Carp Classic that I’ll fish in this weekend. I woke up at 5 like normal but heard the rain so instead of making coffee and grabbing my seat in my camp chair I lit up my computer and wrote yesterday’s blog.
At 8 the rain stopped and friend Neal Henderson surprised Ben Smith and I with some fresh coffee. There was still no rush to head for the water due to overcast skies and developing wind. We sat around and caught up over breakfast of freshly picked morels and eggs.
It wasn’t until nearly 10 am that we found ourselves setting up to track down some carp on the fly. My teammate Ben Smith and I haven’t fished together since last summer on the Henry’s Fork. We also brought along Neal and his son Jack. Neal hasn’t been on Blackfoot Reservoir so we showed him around a bit.
I walked to the bushes where I got my carp yesterday. I grabbed a seat on a rock and waited. Sure enough another showed. I couldn’t fool this one nor the next three. But an hour into my hunt I found and landed another happy mirror carp on the crayfish pattern.
After that fish the wind kicked into overdrive and you could honestly call it a cyclone (turns out there were tornado warnings 50 miles away!). We didn’t give up but to say we were wandering aimlessly wouldn’t be a lie. We were basically casting blind to muds that we couldn’t tell if they were formed by carp or the huge waves.
Before the afternoon ended there were seven of us. Friend Boots Allen arrived and two of Ben’s friends, one of which will take our open spot on our team left but Trey not showing. Seven fishing and only one more fish caught in the afternoon. It was me with this hunk of a mirror carp that may have topped the scale at 20lbs.
We packed it in around 6 pm with windburn faces. It was so windy and cold our faces hurt. We were in good spirits though because we knew a dozen more of our buddies were arriving tonight and it turns out they were already at camp preparing a feast for us.
After a magnificent dinner we stood and sat around the fire drinking beers till midnight. Its sounds like a dumb thing to do the night before a tourney but keep in mind this is a fundraiser for our friend Johnny Boyd. It’s all about raising as much money as possible and having a blast. That we’re going to do!
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