Let's create a super-fish for fly fishing in the 21st Century. It should be smart, selective, strong, fast, almost indestructible, and plentiful in cold, cool, warm, and tropical waters from coast to coast and border to border. This super-fish should never need stocking, must coexist peacefully with other gamefish, feed on flies from top to bottom, and be as colorful as a Snake River cutthroat. Such a mysterious wonder-fish would be as valuable as gold, so we should call it something special; how about the "Golden Ghost?"

What fish could we cross to develop such a magnificent super-hybrid? How about first crossing a bonefish with a permit for speed, strength, wariness, selectivity, and prestige? For durability, let's cross this "per-bone" with a redfish and a cutthroat for brilliant color, ability to live in warm or cold waters, and a distinct willingness to feed from top to bottom on flies that imitate almost every conceivable natural food.

Dave's Popcorn Bug

Dave's Damsel Nymph

Whitlock Chamois Leech

Whitlock's Bright Spot Carpenter Ant

There's still one more ability that this wonderful fish needs to posses: the ability to survive man's pollution. Resistance to acid rain, PCBs, heavy metals, siltation, and oxygen depletion, as well as disease and parasites, would be a distinct advantage. It looks like we'd have to find a stainless-steel fish for the final hybridization. The crazy twist to this fantasy fish idea is that nature has already evolved it for us, and it has lived in the United States for well over 100 years. It's been in Europe and in its native Asia much longer. This incredible fish is the carp, and I'm coming out of the closet to tell you that I've been quietly fly fishing for this "golden ghost" for over 50 years.

In fact, since I declared myself a carp fly fisher about four years ago, I've been amazed and pleased at how many people have told me about accidental and planned encounters with carp as they fished lakes and streams across North America and Europe. The first carp I caught on a fly hit a #10 black-and-yellow bream fly I was using on Taft Lake in Oklahoma on June 1, 1946. It fought so hard and so long that it put a permanent bow in my first fly rod, a well-used, 9-foot, 3-piece bamboo that my dad had bought in a pawn shop.

I never forgave that rod-warping carp, not only because it bent my rod, but because I thought I had a 10-pound bass and it turned out to be a meager 4-pound, golden-sided, "bugle-mouth bass." Even back then, I was ashamed to tell my folks that I'd caught a lowly carp, because I thought they might laugh.

The fact is that fly fishers since the beginning have been fooled by carp into thinking they have hooked a world-record brown trout, walleye, salmon, or smallmouth bass, only to have their elation sink into shame and embarrassment when their "record fish" rolled to the surface to reveal the golden-laced, checkerboard side of a carp.

Over the years, I've gradually become more interested in these remarkable fish. Encounters with them have always been challenging and surprising, like my first hookups on surface flies in the spring of 1957.

While spring squirrel hunting from my canoe along Bayou Creek in Oklahoma, I noticed large fish swirling under overhanging mulberry trees as feeding squirrels and birds dropped the berries into the water. The next weekend I returned with my fly rod and a purple deer-hair mulberry fly I had tied, and I hooked carp from two to nine pounds, right at the surface!

Carp can grow to extremely large sizes in a wide range of conditions. From golf course ponds to the Great Lakes, carp are readily available to anglers across this continent as well as in Europe and Asia. Tackle requirements depend on the size of the carp you are after, and the size of flies you're likely to be using.

Any fish is fun to catch on a fly rod, but when a big carp takes a fly, it's more fun than any other freshwater fish. Why? Carp are more like the elite saltwater flats fish--bonefish, permit, redfish, and cubara snapper. They are faster than a trout, stronger than a permit, and have more staying power than a smallmouth bass. After all my years of searching, four years ago I discovered a paradise of carp fishing, and I can't keep quiet any longer.

I have been fortunate to fly fish some of the world's best fisheries, but I rank the trips I've taken for the last four summers to the limestone flats of Lake Michigan, fly fishing for tailing "golden ghosts," high on my top-ten list.

Dave Whitlock is a FLY FISHERMAN Editor-at-Large and author of several fly-fishing books. He lives in Norfork, Arkansas.