Off to the Vise - Carp

I haven't tied flies in quite some time. Then again, I haven't fished in a while until this past weekend. No, I didn't blog about it and won't be. There's nothing to tell. Saw no fish, caught no fish. I did chat with a couple other people on the river who were singing the same sad tune I was. Thus, no post.

Back to what I was saying. I haven't tied flies in quite some time, and I feel a little guilty. Because of that I dropped by the fly shop over the weekend to pick up a couple things I don't have to tie a special fly. What to tie? I have plenty of typical trout patterns, and I still have a number of random steelhead flies. On the other hand I've been wanting to do a little more carp fishing this spring/summer, so a carp fly is my goal. What does a carp fly look like? If you ask me it looks like a bunch of garbage that you have strung around a hook. As long as the fly has a little weight to get it down and then swims through the water in front of a feeding carp, he will eat it. Carp are not picky like trout, possibly because pretty much no one fishes for them. Carp are also not small like trout.

The only carp specific fly I really know of is Jay Zimmerman's Backstabber carp fly. Does it work? I don't know, but I trust Jay. At the very least he knows way more than I do. And he can show me how to tie it via YouTube.

It's actually a surprisingly simply fly. It only takes a couple ingredients and ties in just a couple minutes. Even for the novice like myself.

Attempt #1 looked like this:

Like I said, garbage on a hook with some weight.  That's about it.  I don't know if I did a good job on this one, but as far as I can tell it looks just fine.

And 15 minutes later I had the following:

Enough to hook and lose four carp!  Now I just need to figure out where to go chase the carps around once I get frustrated with the impossibility of catching steelhead.