Jumping out of the boat and going after carp on foot is one of our biggest struggles. Northern Lake Michigan is mostly rock, often making it a painfully slow ordeal to approach carp within casting range. No matter what conversation we have before leaving the boat, with me often making comparisons to approaching a heard of deer, it often ends with few or no fish landed.
Unfortunately nothing is learned from these failures, the angler walks away certain that the carp were way too spooky for anyone to catch. From my eyes it looked like they attacked the fish like a pack of teenagers at a pizza buffet.
I once had a friend visit, a great guy but one of those fellas that has to learn everything through their own eyes. We went to one of the archipelagos small islands, jumped out of the boat, he went left and I went right. Before this I had been dropping all the hints, that his lack of success was a result of him moving too fast and making too much noise. My hints, as I thought, had no effect because he left the boat walking in knee deep water about as fast as someone could.
A few hours later he approached me after circling the island, still in knee deep water, as soon as he saw me he yelled that we should get the hell out of here, no fish. I told him that I had landed 7, all from the rock I was standing on that was about a 100 feet from the anchored boat. He called bull and I had to show him pictures before he’d believe me.
The sad ending to this story is that neither my friend or almost any of my customers have gotten any better over the years. It is so bad that we go to every length to keep them in the boat.
