Date	Temp	Water temp	Pressure	Solunar	Conditions
12/04/2021 9:00am	59.7°	50°	30.09	Excellent all day	Clear

We’ve been forever pursuing the elusive event where Kira catches a fish…anywhere. The poor girl has been fishing with me plenty of times for plenty of types of fish, and for some reason they never bite. Finally this morning was different. One of her lines started getting small hits, meanwhile another of our lines went off big. She scrambled to the line and set the hook, then reeled it in. It put up a decent fight and she handled it well! She got it to the shoreline and it fell off the hook! The video playback looks like a Common Carp, I’m guessing around 16″ and 2lb. Not a record but an impressive first fish!

Then, within 10 minutes one of her other lines started getting hits and the line stayed taught but no motion. We left it alone for a few minutes, then it was bugging me. So I decided to bring the line in and see if it still had bait. There was a lot of tension on the line as I was bringing it in. Strangely, the line was swirling where it entered the water as I was bringing it in, almost like I had some snagged thing I was bringing in. All of a sudden, this 2lb goldfish appears on the end of my line! 16″ long and zero fight.

So overall a great day, expected it to be a lot busier based on Solunar table data, but not complaining!

Update: I contacted the Arizona Game and Fish department about the goldfish, and this was the response:

My recommendation for you is to remove goldfish from the CFP lakes when you encounter them. They are typically survivors of aquarium stockings that people wanted to discard to start new or many of them get too big. There are many different species of aquaria fish that end up in our Community Fish waters. They compete for space and food with the stocked game fish and can impact the quality of the sport fishery.

Now having said all that, goldfish are closely related to carp and koi. A form of carp are stocked at Tempe Town Lake for aquatic insect control. The City of Tempe does spend a fair amount of money on these fish. There is little doubt that goldfish, on some level, eat the aquatic insects (midges, blackflies) just like the carp and koi do. So as usual, there is no easy answer. At Tempe Town Lake, you probably did the right thing by releasing the goldfish. However, at other lakes, I believe the harm goldfish can do to a fishery outweigh their possible benefits for insect control.

ANDY CLARK | STATEWIDE SPORTFISH PROGRAM SUPERVISOR