Battling stigma ... and carp

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Orange fish bad. Many anglers think that. I don’t. I’m indifferent to the common carp.

I don’t have much to do with them. We leave each other alone. They won’t chase the moving lures I typically fish, and I don’t leave a gob of worms or sweet corn-laden hook sitting where a bottom feeder is likely to find it.

As kids in the 1950s and early ’60s, we used to wrangle carp when they were the dominant fish species in a chronically degraded river before the Clean Water Act of 1972 curtailed point source pollution.

Even then we knew they were déclassé — non-native bottom-feeding rough fish. We always felt a little embarrassed to be fishing for them and hoped no one would see us with our forked-stick-supported $7.50 rods surrounded by ears of sweet corn and a bread sack full of doughball.

If you have a low opinion of Canada geese (I don’t) and want to assign them a derogatory name, you call them sky carp. In 2022, a minor-league baseball team in Beloit, Wis., formerly known as the Snappers — a reference to snapping turtles — rebranded itself as the Sky Carp.

The team said the name refers to geese that don’t migrate in winter — fitting, it said, for a city so vibrant no one wants to leave.

“Sure, that’s it,” the erudite and unfoolable Gazette sports columnist Mike Hlas wrote last summer.

I’m with Mike. Carp remain stigmatized, rightly so or not. Fly anglers, especially, esteem them for the difficulty in enticing them to take a fly and for their prowess as fighters.

In the post-1972 era of cleaner, clearer water, the common carp is much less common than it once was. Still, about once a year I tangle with one. This year it was April 4.

The common carp, with its soft, fleshy, toothless mouth flanked by sensitive, rubbery barbels, is ideally suited for vacuuming soft organic matter from the soft bottoms of rivers and lakes.

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That’s how the bite was. Nothing definite. Just a dull stoppage of my plastic worm-tipped-jig’s forward motion. No hookset indicated or required. Expecting a snag, I raised my rod tip, and the snag started moving.

Unlike a smallmouth bass, which reacts with enraged fury when hooked, this fish behaved almost calmly but with the stubborn power of a mule.

The sluggish burden at the end of my line felt much heavier than any fish I intended to catch. Big catfish or carp, I concluded.

I’m not sure it even knew it was hooked until our eyes met. My recognition of it as a rough fish removed any anxiety I might have felt about losing a lunker. Its recognition of me seemed to amp up its energy level.

We both had all day to see what would happen.

Despite the tension of the drag on my reel and the arched resistance of my spinning rod, the carp swam slowly and steadily toward the middle of the river, where the current amplified its power. After several minutes we reached equilibrium in which neither could gain ground on the other.

Eventually and gradually, against fits and starts of resistance, I worked it toward the bank on which I stood and finally the fish, with its golden-orange scales the size of a quarter, swam ashore almost voluntarily.

Figuring it likely to be my biggest fish of the year, before I released it I took our picture, but my arm wasn’t long enough to get much more than half the fish in the frame.

Then we each celebrated our newfound freedom: the carp, by going back to scarf organic matter from the river bottom; I, by going home to rest.