The Curse of the Carp and the Dumbest Adventure Ever

As you readers (all three of you!) may know, it's been a little while since I've been fishing. My last documented trip was way back in December and it featured excellent photography, beautiful weather, and an enjoyable experience with friends. The following post contains none of these things. Instead, it will involve road rage, a bluegrass band, and several pictures of carp. If none of those things fit your picture of something you'd want to have on your browser history, let alone read, I'd strongly recommend leave that you leave this blog, shut off your computer, and perhaps find a nice book.

I warned you.

Now why exactly have I been so unable to wet a line for the entire month of January and February? This largely has to do with my exhaustively painful schedule revolving around brutal schoolwork, competitive swimming, "winter percussion" (look it up and feel sorry for me), and a series of escalating musical endeavors. Normally at this point I'd plug my band "Birds With Hats," but I have found that mentioning those three words in the company of my friends correlates strongly with eye rolling and jumping out of fire escapes. If anyone reading this would like to hear yours truly pass a kidney stone through a delay pedal, click here. If you are like most normal people, wisely ignore the link and continue reading. In the meantime, I'd like to show you a picture of a different band that plays bluegrass, country, folk, and other genres of music.

There's me on the right demonstrating that playing an acoustic guitar is not indicative of being cool.

 Now, the last couple of months haven't been entirely fishing free. I've taken several trips to my local carp pond in hopes of snaring up a few of these slimy suckers. However, all of these trips have been largely fruitless. In fact, until last week I hadn't caught a carp since October. I was almost beginning to forget the feeling of having to wash a thin film of slime off of your hands and anything you touch for the next week. Luckily, on my most recent trip I was able to hook three decent carp.

Carp are some of my favorite fish to target, but successfully catching them is very hit-and-miss in many places. In small lakes like my local carp pond, these fish become educated and irritatingly picky. The challenge is part of the fun, but it gets tiresome to constantly get skunked and know that the next trip(s) will likely have similar results. Unfortunately, there isn't much else to fish for at this time of the year, especially in the local pond. The ODFW stocks trout in there a few times a year, but the next stocking wasn't going to be scheduled for another couple of weeks. However, I made a few calls and found out that the Mt. Hood Community College pond in Gresham had recently been stocked with a thousand fish. Unfortunately, it was an hour away from my house and I had no time in the afternoon or on the weekends to go fishing. However, I came up with an idea.

An idea almost as bad as turning a surfperch picture into an album cover.

Proving once and for all that teenagers are stupid and have poor decision-making skills, I decided to sneak out of my house and drive to the lake myself at 5am the next morning. I drove off in the general direction of Gresham, OR, everyone's favorite sewer. This diseased septic tank of a town is known across the state for having a community-wide meth addiction that a reporter once referred to as "ridiculous" and not much else. I also had no idea where it was, despite having driven to and past the Mt. Hood Community College more times than most of the students enrolled in their prestigious academic program. I got lost along the way, and at one point Google Maps instructed me to make a U-turn in the middle of a freeway, but I got there safely before the sun came up. At this point, my parents had awoken to discover my absence and had (angrily) called me. From what I could surmise from the volume and tone of their speech telegraphed over the phone, it could be implied that they weren't entirely happy with my decision to disappear in the early hours of the morning without any warning or notice. When they found out that I was in Gresham, they became even more freaked out and demanded that I get inside my car, lock the doors, and drive as fast as I could home. I insisted that I was safe. I might have been standing alone in a barely lit parking lot in the dark next to a small pond in an area known for stabbings ("random stabbings, not just the regular kind" in the words of a friend who lives there) and frequent sewage spills. However, I was there to do one thing, and that was to fish for trout.

The fruit of my efforts.

The fishing was unsurprisingly unspectacular; I brought a few small rainbow trout to the bank using pink power eggs as bait. However, I got engrossed in the fishing and forgot to check the time. When I finally did, I had realized to my horror that it was close to 7:30, only fifteen minutes before my school was scheduled to start. There were also about a dozen texts from my mother asking whether or not I had arrived at school. "Almost there," I replied before sprinting to the car and gunning the engine. There was absolutely no way I would make it to class on time, so I called a couple of my friends and asked them to facetime me at 7:45, so I could be in class while driving. Unfortunately, it was right then when my phone battery feebly sputtered out and became lifeless. 

Maybe next time I'll take the rest of the class with me.

Kamran Walsh