Last night after a discussion of where to go fishing today, Mickey and I chose to go to the Chute. Our choices were the Private Hole, Lake Whittington and the Chute. We rode up in the rain but the radar showed it would not last long. It had rained enough to get the bank good and wet so we had to hook the boat to my jeep to launch. The weather was great with a cool North wind.  The fish were not great however. They would not hit on top so we changed to a Booyah spinnerbait at which they just nipped and bumped. It took a long stretch of bank to catch the first one. It was in very shallow water and sometimes when they nipped you could see a cloud of mud. The deepest water I saw all day was 5 feet. Since they were nipping we tried a shakey head but it got no bites. As the cloudy morning went on the bite picked up and we started catching a few. We also caught a grinner or two and began to believe that they were the nippers.  I don’t think we ever caught a fish out of the “deep” 5 foot water. We crossed to the “deep’ side but not much was going on over there. We then decided to go back to the starting point. When idling along on our way back the jumping carp started. Some were high jumping and some were low jumping, almost skipping across the top of the water. One bounced off of the transom and one off of the motor before one made it into the boat. Pandemonium broke out. The fish knocked one of Mickey’s rods out of the boat and it would have been lost had not the spinnerbait hung in the mesh on the soft ice chest. He fished out the rod and I took the boat hook and removed the fish. Then another jumped dead in the middle of my rods and started flopping in the floor of the boat. Mickey pinned it down with his foot and I got the tenderizer, a cut off hoe handle, and went to work on his head. The head on the carp was extremely hard. I’ve had that particular tenderizer for a number of years and I was afraid the fish’s head was going to get the best of it. However when I finished the carp was floating and would make a wonderful dinner for some raccoon. We ended up with 16 bass and a FOD just over 2 1/2 pounds. The real FOD was this catfish that hit Mickey’s Booyah in a blast that would have made a 6 pound bass proud. You may be able to see the devastated spinnerbait in Mickey’s other hand.