Kalyn Hoggard | Monday, 18 August 2025
One of the ways in which fly fishing has captured my attention for so long is the various number and depth of rabbit holes that it offers to the adventurous mind. I’ve got a tendency to be obsessive about topic or activity for just long enough to understand it well, and then suddenly move on to some other thing I need to understand in depth and immediately. I’m sure there is some sort of appropriate psychological diagnosis, but it is just the way I am. With fly there have been so many things to learn about, skills to perfect, and critters to trick that I haven’t found the bottom of any of the rabbit holes I am currently in.
I have been lucky to move around as much as I have, and even more so that there were new environments and fish to catch along the way. I’m coming for all of you fish and any other critter I may need to catch on fly along the way.
Me- “Well I know that the iguanas are eating the cherries you’re tossing to them, but I don’t have any red flies. I’ve got bright green and bright orange balls thats it. Surely there are some orange berries they eat around here. You think they eat unripe ones too?”
My wife- “Ok, but what’s the plan after you hook one?”
Me- “ Well, I’d stay away from the tail.”
I have probably spent the most amount of time on learning trout, but there are other fish cruising toward the top time-spent spot. Common Carp is probably my most chased after fish right now, and I don’t expect that to change for a while. Carp are spooky, they eat flies, they fight hard, and they have obvious I’m eating body language. Love em. However, I did take a dive down the Goldfish rabbit hole, and boy was that an adventure.
It all started with a spot checking adventure looking for carp. No carp is safe. I will look on google earth and I will find you, and when I do… The adventure took me to this park in Madison, Wisconsin. From above it looked like the type of place that might hold carp, and it indeed does, but after the first couple of minutes looking around. I didn’t care about carp anymore. I cared about the huge multicolored glowing fish swimming around all over the pond. Yes, goldfish. Not Koi. Goldfish, and big ones. My mind started racing. I’m decked out and ready to take on 10-20 pound common carp. I don’t know if I even have any flies that will fit into one of the those goldfishes mouths. Much less the appropriate rod and leader materials for this sort of thing. So, I just watched em. I moved around the pond. I looked for the places that they frequented, and I started devising a plan. Here’s a look into my mind…
Well, I’m guessing the average size is around 3-5 pounds, and they are common carp of a variety so… They are going to fight hard.
Can I get away with 5X? They have little eyes and little mouths. I’m guessing they can see pretty well.
They probably eat berries and bugs. Mainly bugs I would guess. But what kind?
They are sticking around the weeds. So they are probably eating some type of chironomid or another.
Eating smaller chironomids, a 5 pound fish, good eyesight, and a quick dart away from being in a forest of grass and weeds… This is gonna be tough.
This led to several months of looking for more goldfish spots, losing fish, starting to doubt my capabilities as an angler, and general frustrated joy, but I figured it out.
The first real deep dive was trying to figure out why there were goldfish in almost every pond on one side of Madison. The answers vary, but there is no way all of these fish came from toilets. I did find out that there was this pond in the area that had really big turtles. These turtles have been around for quite some time, and apparently there is some sort of tradition of throwing goldfish out into the turtle pond so that the turtles have something to eat. One big flood, and there are goldfish everywhere. I like this answer to my question. I’m not sure that anyone really knows why there are so many here, but they are here and I went looking for them to spawn. This was going to be the easiest way to really assess the situation, and when I saw the goldfish spawn at the turtle pond my mind was blown. THOUSANDS of these goldfish were on the edges around this little 10 acre pond, and the turtles were running all around in the shallows snatching them up. It was a sight to behold.
On comes a new variable. It just so happens that we bought a house with a pretty good sized garden pond. This garden pond needed some love, but had held goldfish before. Now the goal is to figure out as much about garden ponds that I can so I can have good clean water that is filtered. After that I am going to fully commit to catching some nice big goldfish, put them in a container with an aerator, have that container in the van, and run them over to my freshly renewed pond. Doesn’t everyone do things like this? Apparently my wife doesn’t think so.
When I’m on a mission like this, catching fish the hard way is not my idea of a good time. I’ll still use an artificial lure, but I’m not scared to bait and switch. A loaf of bread from the gas station. A dozen micro dough ball flies at the vise, and we are in business. I rolled the dough into tiny little balls. It might surprise you to find out that this is an incredible hand exercise. I then went to one of the ponds that had a higher average size of goldfish, and had loads of them to boot. I filled every flat I could get to with hand fulls of tiny dough balls and waited. Most carp get pretty excited to hang out and graze in an area that suddenly fills with delicious treats. Goldfish are the same way. I don’t like to start casting at them until they’ve basically eaten everything I threw in. It just seems like when I have the only dough ball looking thing around that I get easier and better eats. I filled my little bucket up with five 7-10 inch goldfish, and hoped that I could get them home unharmed.
Now, I have a lovely double waterfall garden pond. It has a beautiful Lilly Pad plant that had a record of 5 flowers at once this year. We have frogs that have moved in, and we have loads of goldfish. One of the original 5 was a big female that decided to have hundreds of babies the first year. I’m not sure how one goes about culling hundreds of goldfish, but my tomato garden has been at a mythical level of growth the last few years. I suppose we should make some sort of tomato sauce and call it a fly fishing endeavor.
Like I said, I have a tendency to get off track, but fly fishing has yet to run out of rabbit holes for me to repel down.