Holy Carp are they biting

[barnyard]

I posted this on another forum, but, I met Vincent (TSC TSC) at the Sturgeon Excursion.

Holy dump, did we have a day today.

Cooked up a batch of Kool Aid corn on Thursday and prebaited our big fish spot on the Mississippi River Friday after work.

Saturday (today), Yvonne and Vincent drove up from Rochester to see if I could help them catch a carp or 2.

We hit the river at 11ish and set up the rod holders. I still had the rods rigged for sturgeon and only had 1 set up with a hair rig. I put some corn on and cast it out. Before I could grab another rod to rig, my 1st rod went off.

Cranked in a nice 17-18 lb fish

And so the day went.

It took almost 2 hours to get all 4 rods rigged with hair rigs and cast out, we had doubles, triples, some more doubles and doubles after that.

We quit counting at 30 fish, then we went to supper. I would guess that we landed 35-45 fish and broke 5-6 off close to shore and lost 5-6 in snags.

Went back out and caught some more, had another double, broke off a couple, landed some more.

We weighed all the fish. The smallest was 12 lbs, the biggest 23. 5 or 6 over 20 and 15 or so that were 17-20 lbs.

Brianna just corrected me, most of the fish were in the 16-19 lb range. It was like there was a whole school bus of 16-19 pounders waiting to eat our bait.

It was a spectacular combination of numbers and good-sized fish. Nothing under 10, no dinks, what a great day!

Vincent and Yvonne were shocked when Brianna (aka Netgirl) non-chalantly dismissed 12-15 lb fish as "cookie cutters."

Some of the fish were showing battle scars from spawning or prespawn, but most were in spectacular condition. Lots of really fat, fat fish.

We met Vincent and Yvonne while sturgeon fishing on Rainy River and invited them for a day of carp fishing. As they were leaving, they said they had never caught so many big fish. It will definately take some doing to repeat today's catch.

Vincent photographed most of the fish and will hopefully post photos. If he doesn't, I will when he sends them to me.

While I did prebait the spot, I would say that I casted out less than 20 half full spods of bait. Probably the least amount of bait that we have used for the huge number of fish that we caught. I don't think that I even took out the spod till we had been there for 3 hours.

Man, it was a good bite.

Tom B