It was bound to happen...

I love half price books. You never know what you will find. Last fall I got this book there, The Practical Guide to Successful FISHING. It's all about European style fishing. Those guys don't fish the way we do. It's all about bait fishing over there. There are chapters on making the perfect ground bait, and getting the perfect maggots to slingshot and boilie recipes. And they have huge pike, much bigger than our North American pike and there is a chapter on dying dead baits bright colors and fishing them for pike which is why I bought the book in the first place. You see I know this little stream and it has muskie in it and...well that's another story. And there is lots and lots on advanced float fishing. It's a weird read, I love it.
Then at the Columbus Fishing Expo, Dan Gapen and Bobber Anne were there selling the world's greatest floaters. Balsa painted with epoxy and fiberglass stems you could bend double without breaking but oh so delicate. So I bought some...
Then I kept running into carp feeding at warm water discharges as I fished them for other fish this winter. So here I ended up. A cup of cracked corn and mixed seed stolen from the backyard birdfeeders thrown out in the eddy of to one side of the pipe for chum. One of Gapen's slip lock floats weighted just right with shot so that if a carp just breathed on it the float would either slip underwater or rise up. The bait itself was a crust off the end of a loaf of bread from the bakery. (Believe it or not the book has like eight or nine photos on how to hook your bread just right.)
Ten minutes later a few bubbles, then a few minutes later a swirl. Then my float winked out of sight. Don't tell Jeff but his custom built rod makes a swell lightweight carp rod. Light enough to throw a float rig but big enough to whip a carp, well just big enough.
Anyways to make a long story short I caught three on a very cold day and had a blast doing it.