mizukry
05-24-2015, 08:41 PM
Decided to take my dad out fishing. He’s 89 but still loves to get out and is in pretty good shape for his age. Got to Skinner at about 5:40 and was surprised not a lot of people in line. About 10 boats and a few cars in front of me. Thought it would be packed being the Saturday of a long weekend. We walked out to my usual shore fishing spot. Decent hike but my dad trucked out a few steps behind me. We were using chicken liver and lug worms. Bite was pretty decent for the first few hours but all the fish were micro dinks. Dad was still having a blast as he was being kept pretty busy. He caught the majority of the fish. After the first few hours, the bite slowed to about one an hour, but was still enough to keep our interest up. About two o’clock one of my fishing rods doubles over and line starts screaming off my reel. Finally a decent fish! Tried to hand my dad the rod, but he insisted I fight the fish. Oh well, wasn’t going to argue. This was a huge fish. I was dreaming of my first Skinner DD striper. After the first run, I couldn’t budge the fish. It was just dogging me way out from shore. I was only using 6 pound test on a 9’ Shimano Clarus medium light rod, so I couldn’t put a lot of pressure on the fish. It felt a lot heavier than my previous 9 lb pb at Skinner. I just made sure the pressure was constant. After the first few runs, the fight turned into more of a slow tug of war. Gaining a few feet and losing a few. It started fighting like a large catfish staying deep and moving slowly. After about 10 minutes, I thought the fish swam into the weeds. The shoreline is starting to get pretty weedy and I just couldn’t budge the fish. I still maintained steady pressure but it really felt like it was stuck in the muck. Finally after about 20 minutes, the fish started slowly surfacing and coming in. I thought for sure it was a big cat but when it surfaced it was a huge carp! What??? My dream of a DD striper turned into a bugle fish… Oh well… it was still a blast. Didn’t have a measuring tape so I used my landing net as a reference. The fish was about 34”-35” long. I couldn’t measure the girth, but it was about 9” from dorsal to belly and about 6” to 8” wide so I guess the girth was about 30”. I looked up a carp weight calculator on the internet and if I use 34” length and 30” girth it calculates out to 25lbs. Oh, forgot to mention, we ended up with 10 micro dink stripers and one decent 2 pounder. Left the lake about 3:00. Had a great day!