Moseley a Carp Master? Not hardly

Is there a fish swimming in Nebraska waters that is more lowly regarded than the common carp? Of course not. Any fisherman worth his salt sniffs in disdain at mere mention of Old Buglemouth.
Count me among the great majority who has looked down his nose at the big golden brute with the prehistoric armor plating (visualize a yellow armadillo with fins).
Bottom feeders. Water muddiers. Taste like river muck on the plate. Then there’s that whole sucker mouth business. Revolting.
Plus, they’re dumb as pond scum. Or so I thought until a recent Friday evening.
There we were, Good Wife Norma and yours truly waiting for the kids and grandkids to join us on the east side of Pawnee Lake north of Emerald. In the meantime I generously chummed the water with two cans of cream style corn. I go nuts over cream style corn. Happily, so do carp as it turns out.
Two spinning rods waited in the grass. I baited the first with corn and tossed it out. This was a graphite, one-piece, light action, cork gripped rod with a silky smooth little Okuma reel. I’ve had the rod for decades and the reel for nearly 10 years. My favorite outfit for sure.
Laying that one down after reeling up the slack a bit, I turned my attention to the second rig. The first one rested against some rocks, so it should be secure. With that I began tying a hook onto the second pole.
This is where it starts to get embarrassing.
It couldn’t have been five minutes later when my favorite rod slammed against the rocks, popped a couple feet into the air and shot into the water tip first like a bullet. There were Jet Skis messing around nearby and, honest to goodness, at first I thought one of them had tangled with my line somehow. That’s how breathtakingly fast and powerful this all happened. It was right beside me, yet I didn’t have time to even make a wild grab. Darndest thing I ever saw. Not having moved so much as a muscle, I just knelt there like a slack-jawed ruminant, staring at the spot where only a ring of ripples remained. Reverse the middle letters of ‘carp’ and you’ll get the general theme of what I mumbled when comprehension finally dawned. Except worse. Much worse.
Why did I mention this is where it ‘started’ to get embarrassing? Because, sad to say, the full story is even more pathetic. You see, three weeks ago when I treated the grandkids to a carp safari on this very lake I came within inches of losing the exact same rod in precisely the same way. That time the carp came unhooked and I was able to retrieve the rod from shallow water at the lake’s edge.
So this had happened before and, obviously, I’d not learned my lesson. Embarrassing. Doubly so now that I must fess up and admit I purchased three rod holders after that last close call for this trip. They were lying there on the grass. Right beside my knee. Price tags still attached. Leering up at me.
Embarrassment upon embarrassment upon embarrassment. Layers of the stuff.
Have you seen that western classic “True Grit?” Remember dastardly Tom Chaney, the low-down guttersnipe who killed the father of Mattie Ross, our cheeky young heroine, in cold blood? Finally Mattie meets the evil Tom Chaney face-to-face on the banks of a river. Arrogantly he dares her to pull the trigger. Promptly, Mattie makes him wish he hadn’t.
“Everything happens to me,” he cries out, clutching his bleeding side. “Now I’m shot by a girl!”
I feel Tom Chaney’s frustration. “Everything happens to me. Now I’m done in by a carp!”
Which brings us to the point of all this, which is to ask if any of you out there in Readerland have a tasty farm pond tucked away behind a hill somewhere. One nobody knows about. One that’s full of big largemouth bass. One in which I might wet a line with your kind permission.
The upside of giving me the green light is that your pond’s bass population faces zero risk. Remember now, we’re talking about a guy so dumb he got out-smarted by a &%#@ stinkin’ carp. Besides, I’m a catch-and-release guy anyway.
So remember that number (you could even write it down) 362-4478.
E-mail? Sure enough. Just contact — stephen.moseley@yorknewstimes.com