"Are you sure this thing will float with two people in it?"  I said.  My cousin Jack and I were standing on a boat ramp on the shore of a lake whose name I'm not allowed to mention, getting ready to shove off after loading fly rods, cooler, and a couple boxes of carp flies.  The stern of the boat was still on dry land, for good reason.  The boat was one of those cheap Bass Pro Shops hard plastic things that looks like the bastard child of a cracker box and a soap dish, and it had been used hard.  Jack usually fishes alone, so to launch the relatively heavy boat he would simply push it off the roof of his Toyota Tercel and drag it over the concrete boat ramps to the water.  The heavier end of the boat, the end with the battery and motor, would grind against the concrete the hardest.

            Jack fishes a lot.

            There was a hole in the stern below the waterline big enough for me to stick three fingers into.

            "Sure, it'll float.  The stern just dips a bit.  The thing is full of Styrofoam, you know."

            At the time, Jack was out of work and getting by on bargain store white bread, stocker trout, and all the panfish he could catch.  Consequently, he was a skinny guy.  This is an adjective that has never been applied to me.  The boat was only nine feet long, and had a weight capacity of 450 pounds, presumably including water.  Jack was not very convincing.

            Well, I figured, the lake was warm.

            On the other hand, it was also filthy muddy and full of… something.  As the electric motor hummed us along towards the great carp gathering spot Jack knew about, enormous bow wakes would surge from the weed beds near the bank towards deeper water.  I hoped they were big carp, but being a science fiction fan, I had visions of H.P. Lovecraft's tentacled creations heading towards deep water not out of fear, but to set traps for us. 

            After three quarters of a mile, Jack turned us down a narrow creek arm which had noticeably clearer water than the main lake.  I started to wonder if the 0X leader I'd tied was going to be too heavy.  Then I looked at the leader Jack was using, a level strand of dirt cheap 20lb test, and figured I was okay.

            A hundred yards down the channel, around the first bend, a footbridge appeared.  Jack cut the motor to slow and told me to get ready.  "Get your feet set.  The first shot is the best, and they'll spook if they feel ripples from moving your feet."

            I smiled and figured he was joking, though the channel was, it is true, smooth as glass.  The banks were higher here than those in the main lake, and in some spots the trees almost met above us, giving the channel a humid, primeval atmosphere, broken only by the whoosh of cars on the highway invisible through the trees and the chatter and gasps of families standing on the footbridge, looking down at our quarry.  "There wouldn't be that many people there if there weren't a lot of carp," Jack said, and again cautioned me to get set.

            He scowled at me as I moved my feet one last time, after he cut the motor.  It was hard not to shuffle my feet.  There were perhaps twenty carp hovering near the bridge pilings, all but motionless.  Shadows loomed over the fish, people gawking at the colossal fish.  The bridge led to a popular suburban nature center, and though it was now against the rules to feed fish from the bridge, it had once been popular.  The carp remembered, and thus gathered whenever the nature center was busy.  We were fishing on a Saturday afternoon on a nice day in September, when lots of people felt the urge to go for a stroll outside --perfect conditions.

            Inertia carried the boat to within thirty feet of the bridge.  I was in perfect casting position, in sight of more sheer poundage of fish than I'd seen outside of a hatchery.  My fly probably would have worked in a hatchery, come to think of it.  I was using a giant ball of white egg yarn lashed to a #8 streamer hook, soaked in my boss Richard's secret formula "Magic Sauce" dry fly floatant, the best big bug floatant on the market, to match the hatch, the bread that some people certainly still threw for the carp.   Okay, to be honest, we had a loaf, too.  It was against the rules to feed the fish from the bridge, but we weren't on the bridge, and chumming for non-game fish was perfectly legal.  The bread was of the same brand of cheap white bread that Jack was living on at the time.  Indeed, over the course of the afternoon he ate more than the carp did.

            But the chum was only for after the carp got spooky and sank down out of sight into the muck.   Now, I had a clear shot at fish near the surface, and I took it.  My big white fly settled a foot in front of a group of three carp, all between about eight and fourteen pounds --average for this lake.  The fly was about as dense as a piece of bread, and settled like one, to hover in the surface film in an amorphous mass.

            A carp awoke from its nap and finned to the fly.  It came lazily, and rose with agonizing slowness.  It sucked the fly, and as soon as it started down, I set.  Then the fish was off to the races, or would have been if I didn't immediately palm down on my spool, testing the 0X tippet almost to its limits.  The fight was not flashy, but by the time I brought the carp beside the boat, far up the creek, where the fish had run, my right arm was quivering.  The fish weighed twelve pounds, the largest of any species I'd ever landed, on the fly or otherwise.

            After we shuffled past each other, my cousin taking his place in the bow and me in the stern, on the motor (I noticed immediately that the boat was down significantly at the stern), my cousin got ready for his shot.  I had used my eight weight, a rod suited to the task.  He was the one who had the carp fishing on this lake dialed, had caught eight in one afternoon a few weeks past.  To up the ante, he chose to fish a seven and a half foot four-weight.  I told him he was insane.

            The fish were spookier now, and many had scattered as my fish thrashed.  A handful still hovered near the bridge, however, in more sheltered spots, up among the bridge pilings and near the logs piled against the bank, deposited there in some long-forgotten flood.  It took several casts, but Jack finally interested one that hovered up in the shadows deep under the bridge.  A moment after he set, the fish dove for the bridge pilings.  Jack put what I thought was way too much pressure on the fish, making good use of the rope-like twenty pound test he was using, bending the little rod all the way to the cork.  The fish turned from the logs, but shot off down the creek channel towards the main body of the lake, with occasional lunges towards the weedbeds.

            Jack screamed at me to follow, and after a moment of fumbling I popped the motor to full power and gave chase.  The water filling the stern slowed us, and line peeled off Jack's reel.  It was a cheap reel, and he didn't have an inch of backing on it.  People were gathering on the bridge now, pointing.  They had probably done the same thing when I was hooked up, but I had been far too busy to notice. 

Soon we were far enough away that there's no way the gawkers could have seen how much pressure Jack was putting on the fish, but it was beginning to tire, and though its lunges towards the weeds still threatened to gain its freedom, it now came up and rolled on the surface at times.  The boils it made gave credence to my Lovecraft fantasies during the ride across the lake.  The fish had been indistinct beneath the bridge; now its true size was revealed.  My carp was its younger brother, maybe infant brother.  It could have eaten the entire loaf of chumming bread as a nice midnight snack.

I don't remember anything Jack and I said when we saw how big his fish really was, but I'm sure we spoke loudly enough that the people on the bridge could hear.  I'm also sure some of them covered their kids' ears.

At last Jack brought the fish up beside the boat.  We each got a hand on it and dragged it in for pictures.  The carp was so big that estimating its weight was at best an educated guess.  Based on the terrible pictures I snapped, we estimate it went twenty pounds, maybe even more.  Jack has size fourteen feet, and one snapshot shows one of his shoes next to the fish's head, heel beside its snout and toes barely past its gills.

The fish was big enough that Jack couldn't even hold it at arm's length, in the traditional perspective-destroying grip and grin pose.  It still looked huge.

We eventually got the carp back in the lake and made our way back to the bridge.  The crowd was still there, but they departed when it became clear that another fish would not soon be forthcoming.  As I had quickly learned when I first tried for a carp, at a different lake, and failed utterly, carp are not stupid, and after having not one but two of their brethren dragged away, the rest sank to the bottom and scattered.  It was time to break out the bread.

As afternoon faded and the light got flat, we cruised at the motor's slowest possible speed up and down the creek channel, looking for the bronze flash of carp feeding against the banks.  When we spotted a fish, the man on the motor would cast slices of bread like frisbies towards the fish.  Most often, the bread was ignored.  When, once in a great while, a fish would tilt upward to suck in the watery morsels, the angler would drop a cast in the fish's path.   Now the carp were more cautious, however, and save for a single six-pounder that tilted up like a trout towards my fly but flashed away with a boil at the last moment, none paid our offerings the slightest attention.  Jack tried creeping a nymph along the bottom beneath the bridge for a few minutes, but one of the sunfish that usually hovered among the carp picking up their crumbs was his only reward. 

At last, when the light was far gone, we broke down our gear and turned for home.  The small battery was starting to go, and there were enough snags between the creek and the ramp that to return in total darkness was unsafe.  We said little as we made our slow way back across the lake.  A quarter of the way home, a night fisherman in the distance turned on his boat lights, attracting both insects and fish.  Jack's boat lacked lights as well as a sound hull, and its electric motor was silent and not powerful enough to leave a wake.  Though we passed less than two hundred yards from the other boat, I saw no sign that the angler in it noticed us.  Only the boils of carp far larger than the one Jack had landed darting for deep water suggested that anything at all noticed us, which is as it should be.