My younger son - - who has become quite the carp fishermen lately (down to mixing his own pack bait and making his own hair rigs) - - took me fishing on Onota from the pier at Burbank Park in Pittsfield this evening, from 7:30 to 10 PM.
It was sunny (until it set), pleasantly warm (about 70 degrees) and a bit breezy.
Surprisingly, we had the pier entirely to ourselves.
I was fishing with worms, and catching mostly sunfish with a few rock bass thrown in, while my son set up two rods baited for carp.
Shortly after 8:30 PM, one of my son's rods "went off" (with the bale open and the drag loose) and you could hear the line play out, so he ran over to reel in the fish, and while he was busy doing so, the other rod also went off, so he asked me to reel in the other one.
After my son managed to get his fish close enough to the pier to land, he then came over and helped net mine.
It turned out we had each caught a good-sized carp.
My son's was about 25" while mine proved to be 29", which is considerably larger than any that I had previously caught.
(We didn't have a scale with us, so I have no idea how much either of them might have weighed, although I do recall catching a 22" carp a couple years ago that weighed 7 pounds and 14 ounces, so I assume both of ours tonight were a good bit heavier than that).
We fished for another hour or so, but (not surprisingly) the rest of our evening proved to be anticlimactic.
Well content with our experience, we drove home, quite satisfied, just as three teenage fishermen arrived to take our spot on the pier.
