My faith in the Full Moon is back!!

John C and I had an incredible full moon outing recently.  This will be our last musky outing for a while because of the heat and the danger of over exhausting or killing the fish in warm water.  But that's why we chose night time under a full moon.  We started with fly rods hoping to break our musky fly rod cherry but came up empty... Except for one big largemouth.  But a properly presented top water walk the dog retrieve almost always works some of time.  This is one of my better fish.  The strike was as vicious as they get.  The tail walk, followed by complete chaos has played in my mind all week.  The ballistic nature of these fish is tough to put into words after the initial strike coupled with shallow water.  Complete awesomeness.  The walleye bite was excellent too.  These big walleye also wanted top water!? Or baits just under the surface.  Fun stuff, one of our best Shanendoha outings.  All fish released strong.  Oh.. The carp came at the end of the night like 4am.  We had beat the water to a froth with everything under the sun.  We had not caught a target species, something with teeth, in an hour or more. Then I hook into something absolutely gigantic.  This thing takes over 100 yards of line!! But it never jumped?  John was working a mulberry tree catching decent channel cats a little ways up river and I screamed loud enough for him to hear me back home.  Even with a medium heavy outfit I was powerless to stop this fish.  State record lunge for sure!.  The shock and disappointment when I found out it was a carp I accidentally snagged in the belly was devastating.  But they sure do command respect when they get that big.  I'd say that carp was 30 pounds!!  Anyway.... Crazy good fishing and we didn't drive more than 2 hours from DC.  We had a citation size carp, musky and walleye and narrowly missed a channel cat and largemouth citation in one night!  We Are really lucky to have such good fisheries so close to home.