Fishing the October heat wave

We've been real lucky to have amazing weather over the last week or so, ended up doing a few short outings in between work sessions.

Started on Monday with a short 3 hour carp outing, in a spot a rarely fish at. Carp were slow, and lots of floating weeds. Still managed to catch 2 mid sized carp about 5 minutes apart around noon.

Headed out for another quick outing the next morning, idea was to target largemouth bass from the shore using topwater lures. Not easy in October but I figured I could use a change in species and a bit of a challenge. Trekked through some dense vegetation in tick infested territory to get to my first spot, then pounded it using 2 of my most chewed up topwater lures, a Pop R and A Zara Spook.

The bass didn't respond, so I switched to throwing a weedless Spro frog into the thick weed mats. Finally found a mat where I got some response, but as usual, the bass kept missing the frog. Just as I was about to switch spots and lures, I managed too hook a nice fat bass, actually had to get into the water to free it from the weedbed. Looks like Ms. Piggy finally got Kermit!

Eventually switched spots, and landed 5 smaller bass on a spinnerbait.

Headed out for a night carping session with a friend later that evening, we spent about 5 hours trying to convince the carp to take our offerings. Though we saw lot's of activity in the area we baited, they weren't too interested in tating the banquet we offered. Called it a night around midnight.

Finally, headed out the following morning for a solo carp fishing session, as Ari couldn't make it as originally planned. Headed back to the same area where he had caught a nice fat one a couple weeks ago, in hopes of matching or beating his catch.

Got started around 9:00 AM, noticed lot's of carp activity in the first 1/2 hour of the day. After it doed down, I managed to hook my first carp of the day. I was on a wall about 6 feet above the water, so quite hard to fight and land fish alone. Luckily, I was using an 8 foot rod instead of my usual 12 footers, and my landing net with telescopic handle is 8 feet long as well. Just to give you an idea:

First carp was a small one, came on a single piece of giant corn:

Added a popup corn to my rig to see what would happen, and reset the line. Sure enough, caught a medium carp about 1 hour later:

Fishing died down for a while, so I eventually switched bait and my rig, to try one that had landed me a nice fat carp in the same spot last October. Basically, I combined some corn, and used a chilli lime toasted corn snack for a popup instead of the standard foam. Topped it off with a sunflower seed shell as a stopper instead of a boilie stop, for added flavour.

Took about 1/2 hour, my line went screaming. I set into a much bigger carp, it wasn't interested in the least bit of coming my way, peeling another 100 feet of line. I tightened down the drag a touch, just enough to keep it from heading into some rock piles next to a dock. Eventually got my first glimpse of the beast, and knew it was what I was looking for. Only issue was to figure out how to land it without losing it or breaking my net. I contemplated jumping into the shallow water with it, but would have a tough time getting it back up, so I decided on simply tiring it out to play it safe. Took a while to do so, and I had one of my best carp battles with it. Eventually got it onto the landing net, and somehow heaved it up the wall with the net still in one piece.

The carp weighed in at 27.5 lbs, beating my last years record for that spot, which was 27 bs, in October as well. Had to use the autoshoot function to get some pics, as there weren't any other people around. Though the pic didn't come out too well, I'm still thrilled with the catch of the day: