6 Monster Carp in France

In Pursuit of Fish without Borders

As a kid fishing on the Mississippi, I never had any trouble understanding the primal thrill of hooking into a carp and horsing it to shore. But as an adult in pursuit of monster fish, I never understood the European craze of “driving and surviving” to catch what most Americans consider to be inedible trash fish. From England to France to Hungary and even Morocco, there’s this obsessive culture of going after these massive, rubber-lipped bottom feeders using all sorts of high-tech gear costing thousands of dollars. That’s why I made it my mission to get a handle on this mania.

The carp I saw online were girthy, barbeled behemoths, almost more vertical than horizontal. They weighed forty, fifty, sixty pounds—sometimes even a hundred—coming out of Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, Croatia, the whole dang continent, where the common or German carp is indigenous. Though often believed to have originated in Asia, fossil finds show that German carp swam in the Danube at least ten thousand years before Christ. The Romans followed, farming carp for centuries on plantations. By the 1400s, carp were being raised in moats surrounding castles and in “stew ponds” by monks. A strong aquaculture commerce for carp was established throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, but as better-tasting fish like salmon and trout fell into fashion, carp became less popular. Then came the Industrial Revolution along with a need for sand and gravel pits to supply concrete and material for roads, homes, railways—infrastructure galore. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the carp now living in manmade lakes had grown into big fat fatties that far exceeded the twenty-pounders considered lunkers in the 1600s. Now, of course, super strains are being stocked, because what could be better than having an Incredible Hulkfish raging on the end of your line?

So almost six centuries after Joan of Arc sat down for a plate of carp, I chose Iktus for four main reasons: 1) It’s in France, the geographical mecca of carp—especially for anglers from the United Kingdom who are absolutely bonkers for this fish; 2) Their two large lakes also have wels catfish topping 250 pounds, plus a wide variety of sturgeon, which grow fast and huge and make this fishery a novelty; 3) The facilities include a restaurant, a bar, a tackle shop, equipment rental, and cabins with electricity and Wi-Fi; and 4) Iktus has a variety of giant koi as well as grass carp. Hence, there were more than enough reasons to make arrangements through a UK outfit called Carp Fishing Trips. Also, the owner of that business, Rob Watts, offered to meet me at Iktus and personally train me on the dynamics of extreme carp angling—which was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

When I got off the plane in Pau on the Spanish border, nestled at the base of the dramatic Mordor-looking Pyrenees Mountains, the first thing I heard was my name on the loudspeaker telling me to proceed to customer service. My checked luggage had been left in Paris, so they gave me a toothbrush and a plain white t-shirt along with some promises.

Rob, a cheerful bald Brit, was waiting for me with Jérémy Fournier, who resembled a wide-eyed Jim Nabors in his youth. Jérémy was the owner of Iktus, and without any further ado, we hopped into his Porsche SUV and shot on over to the lakes.

The presentation was impressive. The building overlooking the forty-acre lake was a stunning work of futuristic architecture. It housed a conference center, restaurant, tackle shop, and Jérémy’s family’s living quarters. A wedding was in progress, there were a bunch of cabins off to the left, and the parklike grounds were populated by joggers, bicyclists, horseback riders, dog-walkers, picnickers, and a pastoral herd of goats n’ sheep. The water was a gorgeous, transparent jade color and full of sunfish, yellow perch, and plenty of plant life.

Rob took me to the bar for a beer, and then we hoofed it to the eighty-seven-acre lake along the picturesque River Pau. Our “swim” (or private fishing area) had two “bivvies” (or tents) already set up, and there were three twelve-foot rods on holders equipped with alarms. I had my brand new travel pole, a super-sturdy eight-foot Fox Sailfish rod, but my reel was in my lost luggage.

Rob sat me down and showed me the “shark rig” commonly used for carp, which operates on the logic that when a fish takes out line it can run freely. If the weight gets tangled on something, it’s designed to snap off to protect the fish. The mainline was an ultra-durable fifteen-pound fluorocarbon, with a couple leaders on each pole made from twenty-pound sinking braid. The sections of line were connected by specialized swivels, stoppers, tubings, and knots.

My instruction came in an almost overwhelming rush. Rob showed me how to tie and connect and position the components of the rigs, and then I copied exactly what he did, taking notes as we went along. We covered knotless knots, overhang knots, Palomar knots, grinner knots, figure-8 knots, boilie needles, splice needles, fake maggot stoppers, gummy stoppers, multi-rig tools, blowback rigs, rig rings, hair rigs, bolt rigs, run rigs, death rigs, whippings, antitangle sleeves, tungsten tubings, tag ends, safety clips, aligning liners, and dissolving foam nuggets all on a sunny afternoon. The basic principal is that a “boilie,” or prepackaged baitball, dangles from a hook attached to a “pop up,” which is a marble-sized orb of foam meant to keep the bait floating about a foot off the bottom. When a carp sucks up the bait, it senses the metal, blows out what it just sucked up, and the hook gets caught on its inner-lip. It’s then up to the angler to set the hook.

What I learned mostly from these lessons was that carp anglers take their passion seriously, and they use a lot of gadgets as well. Some even use robotic bait boats that they send out to drop chum, which the British call “free offerings” or “freebies.” Others use “spombs,” which are bomb-shaped plastic casings that scatter freebies when you cast them out and they hit the water.

I must admit that the technical aspects of this sport were pretty intimidating to someone used to catching carp with just a few kernels of corn on a regular old hook. It was a lot of information to absorb in a couple hours, and it made me realize the sobering amount of detail this type of angling demands—a kind of attention which can only be compared to fly fishing. Plus, amateurs are not encouraged. If I didn’t have professional guidance or proper tackle, not only would I be totally lost, I’d be endangering these fish. If I could even hook one, that is.

Rob’s main advice to me was to always use the best boilies. Meaning the most expensive because they degrade less and stay on the hook longer. The boilies are also used as free offerings, so you don’t want them to dissolve too fast.

Next, we went out in a rowboat equipped with a trolling motor, where we found a drop off with an echo sounder and deposited our bait along a ridge. We then threw out a few handfuls of corn and boilies and brought the rod back to the bait alarms. The line was set tight, and we made sure that the switch on the baitrunner reel was positioned in the “up” position. If it wasn’t, we risked it being tugged into the drink.

After setting up the two other poles, Rob gave me some rig-tying homework and took off for a bit. I accomplished my tasks in enough time to take a walk along the bank through the clover and wild mint where I saw a nice-sized pike treading beneath an overhanging branch. That’s what people fish for in the winter here.

Later that night, we went out for Mexican (not recommended in France), with a world-champ carp angler named Lee Merritt from the United Kingdom. An interview I’d recently read called Lee the “Mr. Nice of the carp world,” and he lived up to this reputation by offering to help me in any way he could. He was accompanied by his no-BS girlfriend Joan from the North of England, where I was told the ladies give it to you straight.

Jérémy was there as well. I learned that he had earned two degrees, one in biology and the other in fishery management, and he had started his fishery ten years ago. I also learned that he had one paddlefish out there and a Ferrari. He said that if the airport called, he’d pick up my luggage. This left me wondering if it was appropriate to tip someone who drives a car worth more than my annual salary.

The evening continued with the fishermen showing each other photos of monster fish, and then Rob and I went back to our spot and “pub-chucked” the rigs out in the dark. We sat back in our camp chairs and talked for a couple of hours. On the other side of the river, there was a festival going on. Fireworks began blasting the sky.

“Well,” Rob said, after the first sonic boom exploded over the lake, “there go all our chances of catching a fish tonight.”

And his words, unfortunately, held true.

But for the French guy in the adjacent swim, it was a totally different story. According to Rob, he had a better section of the lake, which is why he caught two catfish and two carp in the night. We were lucky for him to offer us coffee in the morning, and I was lucky to see his forty-six-pound whopper before he let it go.

It was a mirror carp, which is a genetic mutation of the common carp and a target fish of mine for this trip. They’re rare in the states, but they’re there. I caught one once in Missouri and hadn’t known what to make of it. Mirror carp don’t have uniform scales like commons do; they either have blobby calcium-like plates here and there or scattered scales, and the rest is slimy skin like a catfish. A variation on the mirror carp is the leather carp, which only has a few scales at the most and is extremely rare. The most famous is Heather the Leather, a fifty-year-old fifty-pounder who used to reside in Great Britain and is rumored to have been caught a thousand times.

The news then came that we could move to the VIP swim at the far end of that lake which would offer more possibilities. So we packed up our stuff and threw it in the Iktus truck, and within a couple hours we were set up on a gravel beach that offered a range of about 270 degrees of fishing off a spit where the big ones were breaching all afternoon.

But first we drove to the supermarche for some groceries, and when we got back to the tackle shop my bag had arrived. We grabbed that, I attached my Okuma 6500 Baitrunner reel, and then we had four rigs out in the lake.

Rob gave me some more knot-tying lessons, accompanied by some casting lessons I thought would never end. Still, these lessons proved to be invaluable because casting a carp rod isn’t as simple as you’d think.

The sun went down and nothing bit, but occasionally a pesky muskrat crossed our lines, setting off an alarm. This proved to be a continuous annoyance for the rest of the trip.

I had made it a habit to sleep with all my clothes on (including wet shoes) in my sleeping bag to ensure the best chance of getting a carp. The alarm remote was clipped right over my ear on the headlamp that I also slept with, and it was always a rude awakening. That’s how I slept for the whole week, jumping up and running to whatever rod was shrieking in the night. There were times, I think, that I didn’t fully wake up until I found myself setting the hook.

I should mention that the line on the rods Iktus provided was floating line, which is why the muskrats kept setting them off, whereas the line on my rod was a sinking line that Rob had recommended. It was twenty-pound Halo P-line, and it stayed on the bottom, out of the way of trolling motor props and other swimming nuisances.

Then, around midnight, after several false alarms, I found myself cranking in a strange weight. It was like something was there, but it wasn’t. When I got it up to shore, Rob declared it “A bloody bream!” Aka, Abramis brama, a carpy fish that had also been farmed in fishponds throughout the continent, of which Izaak Walton once remarked, “If he likes the water and air he will grow not only very large but as fat as a hog.”1 This one, though, was flat as a flounder, maybe four pounds, and I was glad to meet it. Rob, on the other hand, changed his original adjective to another one, since this meant that he had to go out in the boat and drop another rig where we’d dumped the freebies earlier.

But just as we were setting that rod back in its holder, another one went off. It was the rod and reel I’d trucked seven thousand miles, and I was on it in two seconds. I struck, and my pole arced.

“Easy, easy!” Rob advised, telling me to raise the rod and crank in while lowering down. “Gentle, gentle, keep its head up.”

It was a carp alright, and that line was strong as hell. Unlike the carp I was used to playing in the states, this fish was pulling straight for the bottom. In the United States, carp are like torpedoes that rocket across a body of water and sometimes acrobatically leap, whereas this one relied more on strength and mass. It made a few runs, but I didn’t allow it any slack. I let the drag wear it out, and then Rob met it with the landing net. Suddenly, I had the hugest carp I’d ever caught. It was a common, nearly forty inches long, and twenty-eight pounds!

Rob treated the puncture in its mouth with some blue first aid cream because these ain’t run-of-the-mill rough fish that you throw on the bank to die; these are sport fish that you treat with respect so that others can enjoy them too. That’s the norm, just like catch and release, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It took a beer to settle my nerves, but I finally managed to get back to sleep. Nevertheless, the muskrats kept triggering the alarms, which kept on triggering mad dashes from my bivvy. At one point a fish hit, but when I yanked the rod out of its holder, a bird’s nest erupted from the spool due to the ultrakinky line. When I tried to pull that tackle in by hand, it got snagged, and the line broke.

I bolted out of bed four more times that night and didn’t get much sleep. What I did get, however, were photos to send to friends.

I also had Lee Merritt as a neighbor, who came over with nearly eighty pounds of carp in the morning. He had a thirty-eight-pound mirror and a thirty-six-pound common in mesh slings which he towed behind his boat. They were both beautiful fish.

I mentioned the term “drive and survive” earlier but without any explanation. This was what Lee and Joan were doing. As self-professed “Bus Wankers” (according to their bumper sticker), they often packed their van full of tents, fishing gear, bait, tackle, camp chairs, cots, bicycles, a grill, a propane-powered refrigerator, a DVD player, and all the supplies necessary to exist in a swim for a week—because nobody goes for less than a week. In fact, when I tried to book with some other lakes prior to finding Iktus, nobody would even return my emails when I asked for three or four days.

Rob and I then moved to Jérémy’s private swim right beneath the tackle shop. Rob was flying back to the United Kingdom that day, and he figured that this swim would be an easier place for a rookie like me because of the deeper drop from the bank. The VIP swim had been really shallow, which made it hard to reach for the landing net when you’re alone and twenty feet out in knee-deep water. Also, there were a lot less snags at Jérémy’s private swim, which was on the smaller lake, also known as “the sturgeon lake.”

Personally, I was glad to be closer to the restaurant that was hardly ever open, and the cabin I’d rented for the week, which had electricity, so I could charge my laptop and phone. It also had a shower and refrigerator, plus the aforementioned Wi-Fi, which would make life easier, even if easier wasn’t the point. The point was to get to that still-elusive eureka moment that would elevate this whole monster-fish investigation into something worth a damn.

“Say,” Rob asked, “can you bring the rowboat over?”

“Sure,” I replied, but when I went over to the dock, it didn’t have any oars in it. That’s why I decided to lean over the bow and paddle with my hands, and that’s how I saw them. They were hunkering under an overhanging willow tree, six eerily white ghost carp, some of them more than thirty pounds. I made a note of their spot and kept on paddling.

The next morning, after another night of muskrat harassment, false alarms, and a missed fish or two, one of the alarms started blaring. Sprinting out of bed, now on my own, I cocked the handle, hauled back, and it was on. It put up a noble fight, and when I got it to shore, it broke the misting surface with a blast of tangerine. Holy crap! Or holy carp, rather! It was a giant koi!

I netted it and got it onto the landing pad. What a fish! It only had scales along the spine, which meant it was of the Doitsu variety. But what struck me most was its human face. Though the eyes were standardly bulbous, there was an oval delineation within those orbs. That, coupled with the curling barbels resembling a neatly manicured moustache and the oblong contours of its head, conjured the visage of my Viennese grandfather, Herr Dr. Ernest Spitzer. That’s who I saw, and he was clearly annoyed at being plucked from his environment.

Another way to look at it, however, was that I had just caught a seventeen-pound goldfish, which was a rare catch at Iktus or anywhere. These fish are reportedly very wary.

Anyhow, I got it into a sling then hung it on the side of the boat as I waited for the store to open so I could get someone to take photos. But since the store wouldn’t open until nine o’clock, I ended up pacing the shore for an hour and a half. When I finally went up there, I found a cig-smoking Frenchie also waiting for the place to open. He said he’d be down in five minutes, so I ran down and held that brilliant orange fish in the sling, waiting for the guy to come down. Hell, I waited ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—and that bastard never came. Eventually, I went back up and got a shop guy to take the trophy shots.

And for the next three days, I didn’t catch squat.

What I did catch was a better understanding of the culture of territory among carp anglers. Rob had told me about some sotted blokes who got mad at some Spanish fishermen for venturing into their turf, which is clearly marked on maps of the lakes. Those blokes then went over to the Spanish swim and got into some fisticuffs.

I experienced a bit of this tension as well when I looked up one day to see a Scottish fellow puttering right toward my floating line. I yelled at him, and he turned his boat around, but my hackles had been raised.

A few days later, scouting for carp around the island in my own boat, I guess I slipped out of my zone. When I was motoring back, I saw that Scottish guy standing on the shore with his arms outstretched, which I assumed was the international gesture for “Big fish!” But as I found out ten minutes later when a bailiff came marching into my swim with the Scottish guy right behind him, what that gesture really meant was “WTF!?” I received a stern lecture about respecting boundaries, to which I replied with a thumbs up.

Here in the EU, there seems to be a lot of deeply rooted nationalistic consternation that goes back to other borders being crossed, both physical and metaphorical. For instance, I heard some complaints about Spanish fishermen being whiny and feeling entitled, some similar laments about the crassness of Dutch anglers, plus considerable talk about the borders that should be established for Muslims. Whereas some of these concerns are more recent than others, and whereas some go back to generations of warfare or even soccer grudges, there’s no denying the fact that Europe (like the United States) is currently in the midst of a toxic debate about who belongs where and what should be done.

Similarly, the alarm-triggering muskrats kept crossing what I saw as my own borders, which is why I kept a pile of rocks by my chair. They, no doubt, probably felt the same way about me invading their lake, and we were having trouble finding resolution. But after a few days of yelling expletives and hurling stones, I realized that my bullying wasn’t going to change their behavior, so I gave that method up.

Then, one afternoon, the goats n’ sheep found a hole in the fence and got into my swim. Consequently, I found myself charging toward them and herding them away like a manic sheepdog. I didn’t want them eating my bait, or the book I was reading, or maybe even my sleeping bag. A dog, also, once found its way in, as did a nosy cat that tried to get my smoked salmon.

That’s when it hit me: whereas humans definitely have an awareness of borders, and whereas mammals understand them to an extent, carp aren’t constrained by the lines we envision. In fact, we’ve been fighting such border crossings for decades in the United States, where in many places killing carp is either encouraged or the law. As a local news outlet in Salt Lake City recently reported:

Crews are pointing to carp as the culprit for Utah Lake’s brown water and lack of biodiversity. The fish first made their appearance in the 1800s, and now millions have taken over and the Utah Lake Commission is working to get most of them out of the water . . . to restore the lake and protect other species and plant life. . . . “Carp have been very destructive here in Utah Lake,” said Mike Mills of the Utah Lake Commission. “Some people kind of refer to them as ecosystem engineers the way they feed, they cause a big change in the ecosystem. They root out aquatic vegetation, stir up nutrients, make the water a little less clear.”2

Likewise, in Australia, there’s a “carpageddon” going on in which millions have inundated the waterways of the Murray-Darling river system. According to an article in the Telegraph, authorities have been gearing up to use “a specially-developed strain of the (herpes) virus” to wipe out “a ‘plague’ of European carp.”3 At the time of this writing, action has not yet been taken, but when it does, residents will have to deal with 2,300 miles of rotting, reeking, rancid fish.

In France, however, right here right now, they’re a desired species pursued for the exhilaration that comes with our sudden connection. And as food. Carp aquaculture has been in existence in China since at least 3500 BC, and there’s still a huge commercial market in Eastern Europe where carp is traditionally served on Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s. But on nonholidays, you can still find commercial carp regularly stocked in grocery stores and fish markets from Europe to Russia to Asia to the United States and beyond. In other words, all over the ding-dang world.

But as I considered all this, a frustration arose in stalking the ever-elusive great white koi. For several days I tried not to spook those wily ghost carps lounging in the shade on hot afternoons. I rigged up a pop bottle float to dangle some corn a foot beneath the surface and freebied that area constantly, but I couldn’t get them to take the bait.

Lee and others figured that the overall lack of action was due to the stagnant weather. When it’s hot and still, the fish don’t move around much. But it wasn’t always hot and still, and I saw plenty of fish moving around. I even saw a snaky sturgeon swim beneath my boat once, and they were always leaping in the middle of the lake. But for the most part, nobody was catching anything, not even Derek Ritchie, another world-class carp star staying on the lake. He’d caught a fifty-pounder a few days before, but that’s when everyone else was catching them.

Anyway, somewhere along the line, it struck me that the word “selfish” contained the word “fish.” For a few fishless days I’d been trying to work this idea into the narrative I was drafting, which at that point wasn’t feeling very optimistic. For literary purposes, I knew I could spin the story to make it seem like a recent chain of interconnected events was conspiring against me, but that just wasn’t honest. Sure, I was battling rogue muskrats and renegade sheep, and I broke my stupid reading glasses, but I knew I wasn’t diseased or eating dirt—so why complain? What I was was lucky to be drinking wine at night with very few mosquitoes out, and the sandwiches I was surviving on were some of the best I’d ever had (especially the green ones made with fresh avocado on country bread topped with pesto gouda). More to the point, I was in France, and fortunate to be doing what I loved, fish or no fish, borders be damned!

On another note altogether, despite all my observations about borders being crossed, I noted a lot of camaraderie. For instance, after three nights of not catching anything, I moved back to the VIP swim, where two other anglers stopped by on their bikes. They were making the rounds and talking to their neighbors to see if anyone was having luck. And the verdict, as previously mentioned, was that everyone was getting skunked.

Everyone, that is, except for Lee, who had caught “a small one, about thirty pounds” two nights before, and a thirty-six-pound common the previous night, plus a monstrous fifty-four-pound mirror. In fact, he’d caught one in the mid-thirties that very morning, and when I was setting out my lines that evening I saw him fighting a fish from his boat so motored over just in time to see him land a forty-three-pound common.

Luckily for me, I now had Lee as my next-door neighbor again, and he just kept giving me stuff. His sponsors had stocked him with products to promote, so he gave me a bunch of High Impact carp boilies. He also gave me a spare pair of reading glasses, some weights, and insect repellent. But most importantly, he saw a fellow fisherman continuously getting burned, and he gave me what he could to remedy the situation. And all I could give him in return was lunch at KFC.

After I struck out four nights in a row, Lee came over with a bunch of tooty-fruity-smelling baits and four new rigs he’d tied for me. These rigs were a bit different than the ones I’d been using, mostly in that the pop up was the bait itself, which was screwed onto a short post extending from the curve of the hook. Not only that, but he found a problem with a linkage in one of my lines, fixed that, and advised going out in the boat to bring fish in.

“I don’t take any chances, mate,” he told me. “It’s the best way to avoid the snags.”

Then came the thunderstorm, which sucked for a bit because I had to sit in my bivvy not fishing. But when it abated, I lit out in the light rain, scanning for fish with the echo sounder at twenty feet, which is where Lee said they were biting. When I found a large mass, I’d drop in my rigs and throw out some corn, followed by a few handfuls of the candied boilies.

Since there weren’t too many snags within fifty yards of my swim, I wasn’t too concerned about getting hung up when hauling fish in from shore. But after I dropped my second line, I realized that I was 150 yards out. Since I’d already dumped the freebies, it would be a waste to relocate, so I decided that because there could be snags somewhere in all that space, I’d venture out in the boat if that particular alarm went off.

As usual, the sun went down. I drank a bottle of wine, then passed out on my cot. Alarms went off a few times, and a few times I jumped up. Each time, it was the dreaded amber light, the one I didn’t want to deal with. Fortunately, they were all false alarms, either triggered by muskrats or passing fish.

But at 12:30 in the morning, the remote control clipped to my headlamp screamed into my ear, and this time it was long and constant. Holy hell! I leapt out of bed so fast that the elastic band around my head couldn’t keep up with me. It blew off like a cartoon character who leaves his hat in a cloud of dust, and I wasn’t going back to pick it up. I grabbed that pole, cranked the reel, hauled back, and it was Fish On!

The next thing I knew, I was out in the boat. It was swimming off to the left, making for the only dead tree sticking out of the lake. It was towing the boat, and I was doing all I could to keep my cool. To add to the confusion, it was pitch black, and I had no light. I couldn’t even see it when I got it up next to the rail. All I saw was a bunch of silver splashery, but I finally led it into the net.

It was one of the most epic fish battles I’d ever fought, but I couldn’t see what I had. So switching on the trolling motor, I hummed back to shore, where I lugged it over to the landing mat and retrieved my headlamp. I could now see that it was a common, and the exact same size as the one I’d caught before.

A few selfies with fish later, I applied some first aid cream to its abrasions, then let it go. My losing streak was over, and I couldn’t have been more excited. I hadn’t met my goal of bagging a mirror, yet I was satisfied enough to end the story right there.

But three hours later, another alarm went off. This time it was my own rod and reel, which handled like a dream. The fish made a couple runs, testing the drag, but I brought it in and was able to walk it back to the net then wade deeper out. I netted it, and the first thing I noticed was its prominent hunchback. Then I saw its glimmery skin. It was a mirror so devoid of scales that it bordered on a leather. It was a twenty-nine-pounder, and by gum, it was a bonus!

I saved that carp in the sling and somehow managed to get back to sleep. In the morning, after catching a twenty-five and a forty-four, Lee came over and took some pictures of my fish and me. And let me tell you: that carp was full of piss and vinegar! I could hardly hold it.

“So my tactics worked for you?” Lee asked after I released it.

“That and the bait made all the difference,” I told him, forgetting that the rain had stirred them up as well. Then I added, “But I won’t give all your secrets away.”

Lee claimed there weren’t any secrets, but I can think of a few details that I purposely left out because there’s got to be some mystery. But even if there aren’t any secrets, there’s the fact that Lee is an international carping champ for a reason. When he drove off that morning, he left Iktus with ten carp under his belt amassing no less than 350 pounds.

After that, it was all downhill, but not in the unfortunate sense. I’m talking more like an easy ride. I was moved to a way less fruitful swim, where again I battled free-roaming livestock and trespassing rats and didn’t catch jack. That, however, didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that I never got a ghost carp. I’d gotten what I’d come to get, and even though I didn’t catch a forty-plus-pounder, I witnessed two and can confirm that there are even larger fish out there.

Ultimately, I was left with two main conclusions:

The first was the obvious observation that it’s a blast to go after monster carp, a fish which knows no borders—which are concepts we create for others to protect us from ourselves.

And secondly, since our fisheries were still in danger, it was time to get to the nutmeat of the matter. Meaning no more dicking around.