Probably all the fishing I'll do this weekend...

Many commitments this weekend, so I wanted to get in a little angling this evening before I lost my opportunity for the weekend. With light rain this afternoon, the carp will be patrolling the margins in the neighborhood lake. It didn't take me long to find some about fifty yards down the bank. Unfortunately, the first one I saw saw me first and drifted away. I decided to try an ambush approach, throwing out some sweet corn and deer corn a little way off the bank and fishing under a float in the middle of it. After a half-hour of nothing but one slider, a move to a new spot was in order. Going down a little farther, I saw a carp--I'd estimate at five pounds--slurping off the surface near shore. I tried to stealthily lower some corn in front of it, but it saw me and spooked. I tried another twenty minutes of ambush in that spot before I caught a snapping turtle of around ten pounds. After that, I decided to try to see, since I had already seen carp on the surface, if I could get them feeding on floating trout pellets off the top. Threw a few handfuls out, and, after a little while, I began to hear channel cats sucking in the pellets. Their surface feeding is unmistakable--a loud smacking sound and a mighty swirl. I also started to see some carp gently slurping the floating pellets off the surface. I decided to bait up with a little chunk of bread, freelined on a #10 Korda Krank hook. After several tries, I saw a carp approaching my bread. He sucked it off the top, and, a second later, I set the hook. It wasn't much of a fight, as he was only 2-3 pounds, but I was happy to net a fish for a change. I quickly unhooked and released him, anxious to get another piece of bread back on the surface. On the next cast, I got the unmistakable smack of a channel cat. I set the hook, and this one gave me a little more of a fight. Soon after, I was unhooking it and letting it go to fight another day. By this time, it was nearly dark, and it was starting to rain steadily, albeit lightly. I tried a couple casts using the light of my head torch to illuminate the floating bread so I could see if I got a strike, but it seemed that the light of the head torch was spooking off bites. Whereas I had been hearing a steady stream of smacks and seeing regular swirls, they seemed to taper off. I was getting pretty wet, so I decided to give it up for the night. Something I learned tonight was that chumming trout chow on the surface really attracts channel cats to the area. In the future, I can use this chum to get them swimming around the area and in a feeding mood, and then fish for them using punch bait under a float. From the sound of some of the loud smacks and large swirls, there were some pretty sizable channel cats feeding--I'm still trying to land a trophy channel cat--12 pounds or above in Virginia--and I'm pretty sure there are some that big in this lake. My kind of way to start off a weekend!