Middleburg Fisherman Will Never Carp About His Catch
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By Leonard Shapiro
o who knew?
About carp, that is, a bottom-feeding fish rarely seen on an American restaurant menu and hardly ever displayed stuffed and mounted over a proud angler’s fireplace mantle or on an office wall. Mark Metzger, owner of the popular Highcliffe Clothiers in Middleburg, knows all about carp. Where to find them. How to catch them. Even the best way to prepare them, particularly around the Jewish sabbath and Passover when its meat is a critical poached ingredient in gefilte fish, along with ground, deboned whitefish or pike. Metzger was born in New York City and grew up in suburban New Rochelle, where his father often took him to a local reservoir, armed with a can of worms. The family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was a junior in high school, and Lake Michigan became home water. He caught the occasional carp there, selling them for $5 each to Chicago peddlers looking for gefilte fish ingredients. After college at Antioch in Ohio, he eventually moved to New York, then headed south to work in the Nation’s Capital, where he often fished in the Tidal Basin. “One day, I met a Frenchman who was a restaurant sous chef,” he said. “We were fishing the Tidal Basin. He had all this equipment and then he reels in this big carp. He showed me what he was doing, gave me
Mark MetZger hauled in this Potomac River beauty just off Hains Point in Washington. some tips, and some bits and pieces of what he was using to catch them.” From that day forward Metzger, pardon the expression, was clearly hooked on carp. “They grow really big,” he said, “and they fight very strongly. When you get one, you know you’ve definitely caught a fish.” Carp have been known to weigh as much as 60 pounds. The Tidal Basin record is 57 pounds and Metzger once hooked one hard by the Jefferson
Memorial that weighed 36.8 pounds, his personal best. And for Metzger and many of his fellow carp fishermen, it’s always catch and release, giving others the thrill of hauling in a rod-bending species. One prestigious fishing magazine has called the quest for carp “the world’s greatest sport fishing.” Metzger described it himself as “hurry up and wait kind of fishing, and definitely worth the wait.” Worms won’t really work on carp. Instead, they’re attracted to bait called “boilies”—fancy dough balls made with eggs to form a hard shell around the dough. They’re manufactured and available in flavors like pineapple, chocolate, strawberry and “even tutti fruity,” Metzger said. He sometimes makes his own bait, because “I can walk over to the Safeway and get all the ingredients I need just going down the aisles.” Metzger still fishes the Tidal Basin, and occasionally goes over to the Northern Fauquier Community Park in Marshall to fish one of its ponds. He also frequently enters carp tournaments in the U.S. and Europe, where competing anglers fish 24/7. They can even sleep on the shore, aided by electronic alarms that go off when a fish is on the line. “It’s the perfect sport to do by yourself or with others,” he said. “We have events where we eat together, shoot the breeze with friends you get to know. But it’s also very relaxing to just do it by yourself.” And has he occasionally partaken of freshlycooked carp, he was asked. “No,” he said with a smile. “I hate fish. I don’t eat it.” So who knew?
Country ZEST & Style | Fall 2021
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