Hi there, my name is Jake Hoy. I am from the beautiful state of Pennsylvania. Being in this state gives me the opportunity to fish for some giants. I have only been carp fishing for three years now and two years seriously. I fish euro style and I have fallen in love with it. It has changed my life for the better. I started off with my buddies Ryan Curran, Aidan Fioravanti and Jessica Day. And we started by using corn directly on the hook. As the months went by we grew our knowledge and learned the euro way of doing it from fishing with Carl over in the UK. It is because of these three that my love for carp fishing exploded and I couldn’t thank them enough.

Being my first blog opportunity and not being one of the cool kids in the US carp community, I’ll go ahead and introduce myself. Bear with me, I’m not an accomplished writer and I put thoughts together like a 5 year old that’s had sugar.

My name is Loren Walters, and I have a problem. I used to be perfectly happy spending hours of time endlessly chucking rubber worms to catch 13-inch ditch pickles and feeling happy to catch a couple pounds of fish. Unfortunately, I started hanging out with the wrong people.

One of my friends (Kevin Zirjacks) introduced me to what has become not only a hobby but is something that I cannot quit, carp fishing. After finally agreeing to do what I thought of as “trash fishing,” all it took was two fish for me to reevaluate my whole opinion on something I had been doing since I was seven.

It changed fishing for me completely. My second carp I had ever caught was 26 pounds!

After struggling a good portion of the season fishing different areas on the river, It was nice to make the trip back to the lake with Triton my trusty Pit Bull companion.

Unfortunately, Northern California was impacted by a handful of storms that made certain areas almost impossible to access but one thing I've learned is to always have a backup plan, just in case your local fishing spot is no longer an option.

Normally around this time of year I would be covered in winter clothing and finding ways to keep my hands from freezing but at the time of writing, It was currently 105 degrees with no signs of fish.

My name is Adam Zahrt, my passion is educating about the ethical use of our great outdoors and natural resources. Especially on my YouTube channel “NorthMan Fishing.” My vision had for many years been to be the next great agriculturist of our time, and my grades matched the mission. However, the waters surrounded me, and whispered my name as I would pass by them in my daily endeavors. After all, I had been a hobbyist fisherman nearly since my inception. The call of the whispering waters intensified, and life became more than soil science and agriculture, life was a combination of fresh air, warm earth, and WILD WATER!

Hi, my name is Austin Crawford and I enjoy most of my fishing time in my home state of Rhode Island. RI has so much potential for truly wild unique Carp! That’s why I really love fishing here because you really never know what’s on the other end of you’re line after the alarm screams. The fish here fight hard and are truly unique, every single one has its own scale pattern and battle scares of living in the wild river.

If you live in the Midwest like I do, it’s hard to ignore the expansive bodies of water that would be within a few hours drive for most that live here, in the form of the Great Lakes. These lakes enormity can obviously be very daunting to think about how they can be fished effectively. Lake Michigan is the closest to me living in central Illinois, coming in at a whopping 14.3 million acres, would truly fit the ‘Inland Sea’ mantra in every sense of the analogy, unless you’ve seen them in person it’s tough to truly describe how insignificant you can feel standing next to one of them.

I recently took a road trip back to visit Los Angeles and found my self walking a few of my old haunts/fishing holes and while I have plenty of fantastic memories, one of them brought back a gush of emotion. Not for the big fish but for the challenging and often extreme conditions/environment that the fish have to endure…tbh, it’s not so easy on the anglers either lol… So I got back home to East Texas and dug out a few LA River system carp capture photos that I had on my local hard drives…and here we are :)

Even though I’d lived and fished in the Los Angeles area for nearly 35 years, I’m a little embarrassed to say I don’t know much about the river systems at all… I say river systems because there are around half a dozen tributaries that run into the LA basin. One stretch in particular was a really handy stretch of water 10 minutes drive from my house that I visited to catch carp in the 3 to 10 lb range when I have a few hours free to fish. It scratched the itch, you know…

In the winter of 2023, Northern California was hit with major storms and floods. My fishing partner Gerrod Winkler and I had to come up with a plan B because our usual Delta river spots were blown out. It was January, so we had to split up to target new water because the spring bite was fast approaching. We opted out of the smaller venues like park lakes and city ponds because we have no interest in recaptured fish, and in my opinion, larger venues are future proof as the sport grows. Gerrod chose to target larger Bay Area and central Valley Lakes while I chose to focus on the Seirra Nevada lakes and reservoirs. Large lakes in Northern California are ripe with unexplored Big Carp waters with 24/7 365 days a year fishing access.

I’m sure most carp anglers in America have had to deal with their fair share of carp hating rhetoric. Most of it is ill informed, overblown, and ridiculous. None of it is very fun, which is why we fish, right?

One of the first times I fished a favorite lake of mine, the head county ranger of the park when hearing I was fly fishing for carp told me to “just throw the damn things on the bank and let them rot!”. For a variety of reasons, that was a very interesting conversation, not least for the fact that I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to kill fish just to let them rot on the bank, or at the very least morally and ethically just wrong. This rhetoric is also coming from the people getting paid by our tax dollars to protect the natural resources of the area. This is a lake inside county lands that doesn’t allow the hunting of highly invasive wild boar, but just killing carp for the sake of killing them is considered fine.

For me personally, nothing is more rewarding than catching fish out of a 2,300-acre reservoir with acres more surface water just waiting to be discovered... My surrounding area has a ton of water that will forever keep me looking for bigger and more beautiful carp. There are some reservoirs that I have not discovered yet that reach up to 4,000 acres… Plenty of exploring yet to do and that’s exciting!

My name is Brandon Curtis, I have been an avid carp angler for just a little over 3 years now and I’m located in the Southern California area. The amount of knowledge that I have gained with carp angling is incredible, it amazes and reminds me that anything is possible.