Carp per Diem

In his 1653 book The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton declared the carp the queen of the rivers, and the species is still highly regarded as an angling prize in Britain and the rest of Europe. Anglers on this side of the pond still reject the monarchy, and the carp is generally regarded as a trash fish. The Minnesota DNR used to encourage people who landed carp to leave them on the bank to rot—though you’d be ticketed for doing so today.

It was not always this way. In the early days of the state, Minnesotans wrote to the fisheries department in Washington, D.C., to demand that the carp be introduced in the state. According to Karen Kobey, who is a naturalist with the Three Rivers Park District, the carp was introduced to Minnesota waters in 1883 from Germany. “Across the country, they thought this would be a fish that would be prolific and a great game fish—they’re big and they reproduce well,” she said.

After a few false starts, the fish took off. With no natural predators and an ability to live in low-oxygen and even polluted waters, they soon filled the bottoms of rivers and lakes across Minnesota. The fish’s ubiquity, its appetite for other species’ roe, and its reputation for roiling up mud in previously clear lakes have meant that the carp’s standing among Minnesota anglers has gradually matched its bottom-of-the-river habitat. Even among carp fans, catch-and-release fishing is the norm, although immigrants from Southeast Asia and Russia often take carp for food, according to DNR conservation officer The-Phong Le.

At the annual Carp Festival, held earlier this summer at Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park, 700 carp anglers took to the Mississippi to seize the carp. Children swarmed around a Plexiglas tank that contained some of the larger catches of the day, mostly to crinkle their noses at the big fishes’ barbell-lipped mugs and their dregs-o’-the-river reek.

Paul Pezalla drove all the way from suburban Chicago to compete in the contest, after a friend here bragged that he and his family planned to win the contest. Pezalla’s 18.72-pound catch edged out the runner-up in the adult category by less than a tenth of a pound. Pezalla, a tall and lanky guy who, with his shock of unkempt white hair, could pass for Albert Einstein in a funhouse mirror, is a serious carp fisherman. He says he goes out at least twice a week for 12 hours at a time on Lake Michigan and Chicago-area rivers. He even owns a bait shop that specializes in European carp fishing gear and supplies. So what’s the attraction?

“They’re about the smartest freshwater fish there is, and they grow to be extremely large; the world record fish is in the range of 80 pounds. They also fight as hard as anything,” Pezalla said. “Just about everyone in North America lives within an hour’s drive of trophy-sized fish—20- or 30-pounders. And you don’t need fancy equipment to catch them.”

The Carp Festival’s results back this up. The biggest fish of the day was landed by the children’s category winner, scrappy 11-year-old Jimmy Roppo from Minneapolis, who took 10 minutes and a little bit of help from his fishing mentor, Josef Settele, to reel in a 19.31-pound carp on a line baited with canned corn. This was only his third time fishing.—Dan Gilchrist


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.