From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch – September, 2000
The stiff bass rod bent so sharply it fairly groaned. The reel gave up line in sporadic burps.
A boil of water at the surface drew exclamations from the two anglers. The man holding the rod started to sweat. The woman waved the dip net excitedly.
“It’s got to be a world record,” the man said as the fish made another lunge downward. “I never felt a bass fight like this.”
Slowly the fish began to tire. Finally it was led to the net and then lifted out of the water. It wasn’t a bass, though.
“Ohhhh, no, a carp!” the couple moaned in unison.
“It’s got to weigh at least 15 pounds,” the man said as he put his foot on the fish to remove his lure. Without ceremony, the fish was sent overboard.
Like most anglers, that couple felt little respect for the powerful, beautiful fish that had attacked the lure and had given the man a fight far longer and more challenging than any he had had before.
But once upon a time, the carp was a prize fish in America. And it soon may be again.
In the late 19th century, carp were considered by many knowledgeable people as the saviour of American fishing and the freshwater fishing industry. In an article in the current newsletter of the Carp Anglers Group (CAG), Al Kowaleski tells how the exotic carp came to be in almost every lake and river in the United States.
In the decade after the Civil War, pollution and over-fishing were causing a rapid decline in the fish in the country’s fresh water. Freshwater fish were an important food source for a fast-growing nation.
In 1871, under President Ulysses S. Grant, the federal government began a search that in 1877 in resulted in the first stocking of 345 carp purchased in Germany. Government experts chose carp because they could be raised in ponds and were highly adaptable, prolific and good to eat.
By 1898, the government had distributed some 2.4 million carp for stocking, and after that the states took over, then commercial producers.
By 1940 and World War II, the country was harvesting and eating 36 million pounds of carp a year. Fine restaurants offered carp as a delicacy. Many restaurants offered it as daily fare.
After World War 2, though, technological advances in saltwater fishing and transportation made saltwater fishes widely available. The seas were consi dered “pure” in those days, Kowaleski writes, while the nation’s rivers and lakes were considered polluted.
They were polluted. And with them the carp, which by then were about the only fish surviving in numbers in many American waters. Consumption of carp and fishing for carp declined and soon Americans were wrongly blaming carp for the decline of native fishes.
We were blaming carp for the mess we made because carp were the only fish that could survive there. And of course the carp tasted bad. The w ater they lived in was bad.
Since the 1970s, though, the country has made progress toward cleaning up its lakes and streams. That has started a turnaround for carp and carp fishing. Eventually, too, attitudes will change about carp as food as the ocean fishery declines from the same man-made pressures that almost destroyed freshwater commercial fishing.
Most anglers of our generation regard carp as “trash” fish, but that, too, is changing. A growing number of people are fishing for carp. The sport is developing its own literature, including a new magazine, “Total Carp,” published in England but aimed at anglers worldwide.
Indeed, carp fishing has its own purists, who consider large carp a trophy equal to bass, trout or salmon.
Many of these purists, plus a host of ordinary anglers, will gather on the banks of the lower Chicago River in the World Series of carp fishing, the Chicago Carp Classic, Sept. 29-Oct. 1.
Many of the members of the CAG will be there, including some from Europe and some from St. Louis. The setting itself is meaningful – the Chicago River was once a poster child in the crusade to clean up the nation’s water.
The Classic is a climax of the CAG competition season. Most of its fish-ins – the term used because “tournament” is too stuffy – are in the Chicago area, but some are in New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Competition is not the primary focus of the 1,000-member CAG. Teaching and promotion of carp fishing is. Mostly, CAG is about fun. Even its purists laugh off the religious pomposity of some in the trout and salmon fraternity.
Carp Anglers Group: www.carpanglersgroup.org
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