Apocalypse Later

The weathermen keep predicting an end to the nuclear-winter apocalyptic skies we enjoy in the PacNW every winter. And said weathermen keep being proved incompetent. I understand that predicting the weather can be a bit difficult, and I don't hold it against the professionals when they get something wrong when predicted five days in advance. But when you can't even get the weather right on the day of, I think you should be either hung in effigy or publicly flogged. Or maybe both.

Such was my experience on Sunday. I watched the weather all week to determine what the optimal efforts would be that weekend. And I was assured all week that Saturday was going to be partly cloudy/sunny but relatively nice, and that Sunday was going to be gangbusters nice. That prediction was revised down on Saturday to show cloudy/rainy on Saturday and partly cloudy on Sunday. The revision didn't change my plans, which were to head out carping on Sunday.

I woke up on Sunday to cloudy skies so I checked the weather hoping the clouds were to burn off soon leaving sunny skies in the late morning and afternoon. The forecast did not let me down and showed sunny skies as of 10am through 3pm with some clouds and rain coming in the evening. That will do. So I packed up my gear and headed to one of the few good spots that I have discovered in the area. The whole way there I was watching the western skies with a darkness growing in my soul. I am not generally an angry person but we all have our limits.

I arrived at a good place to park around 9:30 and started putting my gear on. It was pretty obvious to me that the sun wasn't coming out anytime soon; the cloud cover was still fairly heavy and even looked like it could spit on me a little. Sort of how I wanted to rain spittle down on the weathermen just then. But grumbling under my breath while donning my waders and boots I headed out in search of big lipped fish.

In the end the weathermen had it completely and totally wrong. The sun never even came close to poking through all day and a bit of drizzle even came down a few times that morning. On the flip side I found some mud flats that were totally chock full of carp. I'm not sure if it was a good thing in the end, but the visibility of the water was about 2 inches. That made it impossible to spot the fish, but it also shielded me from view to some extent, and with the cloudy skies keeping me from seeing into the water anyways maybe it was for the better. Fortunately for my prospects tails were poking up everywhere, and in a lot of places where tails weren't poking up I could see burbly water.

Zero visibility made it impossible to cast directly to a carp's mouth, but there were so many of them even when I guessed wrong I found myself hooking up with other fish that were apparently in the vicinity. At one point I even found myself casting to to a baitball of at least 6 feeding carp all compressed in a five foot diameter area. It looked a lot like this.

My poor skills resulted in around ten hookups (some of them snagged fish), one actual catch, and another one that took off like his tail was on fire and dragged my flyline to within a few wraps of the backing before popping off. By the time noon came around all the feeding seemed to shut down. A few fish were cruising around, but with zero visibility it was nearly impossible to make anything happen. I fished uneventfully for another hour or two before going exploring for a while. Finally I headed home around two once I became fully convinced the weathermen are total boobs and the sun wasn't going to show itself.

It was a fun outing even though the weather disappointed.