Carp on the Fly-July 2009

Both these beauties were taken on a scorching July afternoon below the Morris Shepard Dam at Possum Kingdom Lake. Modest size carp were feeding in the shallow riffles, with their backs out of the water. I must have cast to forty or fifty of them, and landed two. I had a great big one on for a brief moment, but he took my fly and went his own way. Casts had to be fairly long, and the fly was left motionless on the bottom until I suspected the carp had moved over it. Then, a typical strip strip strip retrieve, more often than not ignored. The fly de jour was a Befus fly, the rod was the old six-weight Orvis graphite that Tam gave me when I graduated Med School in 1981. The reel was a Cabelas SLR I bought off a guy on the now-defunct Texas Fly Report. And-what trip to the Brazos would be complete without a trip to the worlds loneliest Whataburger-I met brother Jim for a Whopper with cheese.