There is something about fishing from a small island which is especially exciting. To be surrounded by water, with carp potentially coming from either side of the island, to be fully focused on your fishing, to be out of the 'civilized' world, just you and the water and the fish. It's just... special. I was impressed by Mike Dragone's first discovery story, the one where a small group of guys had a terrific blast on the CT river, and this was something I was eager to emulate. You might remember that my discovery teaser story started with some island fishing which didn't quite pan out. Based on all of that, when Domm suggested that we should do some serious island fishing this month of October, I was more than game!

We made a couple of attempts, one being quite successful, but I'll just focus on last week-end. The plan was originally to go there for the entire Friday, then stay for the night. Yeah, well, logistics didn't work out terribly well, and Domm wasn't available until 2PM, plus his designated driver fell sick. So I drove to the venue late in the morning, dragged my canoe to the shore, loaded it with my gear, and was very happy to have my Minn-Kota engine to get the whole cargo to its destination. Although I didn't think anybody would come to steal it, I tried to hide my gear as much as I could in the bushes. I did a bit of depth finding with a sonar, and found some interesting structure around the area where I wanted to fish. Back to the shore, back to the car, and here I was driving back to Boston to go get Domm. And his gear. And... his dogs, two of them! Back on the road, back to the canoe, Domm's gear was loaded, now we had to convince the dogs to go with us. This didn't go that easily, Domm got quite wet in the process. Now imagine two guys, two (rather large & agitated) dogs and plenty of fishing gear on a not so stable and clearly overloaded canoe, in the middle of a very deep lake. How we made it to the island of choice without further trouble, I am not exactly sure, but we made it!

Once disembarked on the island, the dogs suddenly enjoyed total freedom and were running like crazy from one end of the island to the other. In the mean time, we started to chum the two most obvious openings, and soon enough, some rods were in the water. With a bit of landscaping, we created another opening, so that we could multiply our chances. No need to say we didn't have much of a clue on where exactly fish might show up, having never set foot to this island (actually, I did visit it last year, but without fishing it, just to take a look). Domm had this great underwater feature in front of him, and this seemed like a possible winner. By now, the dogs seemed quite interested by the smell of our bait, and stopped running for a while, which was good giving their tendency to go crash in the rod pods at full speed.

Now that the fishing gear was in place, time to set up the shelters. The weatherman wasn't terribly nice with us, and had planned for some sustained rain during the night. The end of the day did look good, but better be safe and dry than sorry and wet. Domm had bought a really nice bivvy at a bargain price, which made my own small pop-up tent look quite silly. Look at the palace and its happy owner!

By then, we were quite close to dusk. Man, this island fishing stuff requires quite some work before being finally able to relax on a comfy bedchair and watch our rods. So we watched. And watched. Nobody much was moving, to be honest with you. We swapped some stories, made a small fire to keep us warm, ate our dinner, and retreated to our shelters as the rain started to come at us. At some point in the evening, Domm was quite sure that a fish jumped in front of my rods, but I hadn't heard anything and I was a bit skeptical. Let's see what the night would bring us...

I think we made it to the island around 4PM. Ten hours later, I couldn't sleep and was reading a book in the night. I finally fell asleep, probably around 3AM and around 4:30AM, I was sleeping VERY heavily - which is very unusual for me. I vaguely heard a rush in front of my tent, opened a quarter of an eye, and happily returned straight to sleep. A few minutes later, a big splash finally woke me up. What was all the commotion? Er, what was Domm doing with one of my rods? Hey, wait, he has a carp splashing right in front of him! I grabbed the net, we landed the fish, which proved to be a rather nice one. From what Domm told me, my alarm had been screaming for quite a while before he decided to go take care of it, he found a rod and reel almost unspooled and had an interesting time bringing the fish back, while repeatedly calling me and asking me to wake up. Me? No clue about all of that! So I guess we can readily agree that this fish was Domm's catch and this turned out to be his new PB mirror, a 22-4lb fully scaled. Not too sure if this fish really enjoyed being licked by Domm's dog, but this was clearly love at first sight!