Big congrats to Drake-reg Will Rice and Clint Packo, winners of the prestigious 2012 South Platte Pro-Am Carp Slam. Rice and Packo edged all competitors with three carp landed, measuring in at 83 inches—total.
Rice says this year he got his ass handed him by DSP carp… again. Nothing new there. What was different was that he ended up drinking from the carp cup. “Not sure how that happened other than my partner, Clint Packo, brought his A-game. And then some.” Here is a fish that was taped at 28 inches.
The last fish Packo tagged at the end of the first session was a 30-inch bruiser. The other big winner of the Carp Slam weekend was Doug Long, who raised more than $2,000 for river restoration efforts. “All in all, this year’s Carp Slam 6 and the Evening on the South Platte was a big success,” Rice says.
For more on the weekend, check out the wickedly incoherent ramblings of Fat Guy Fly Fishing: “We were going fishing. We did. It was much of the same. Some people don’t care about salad. Some people are professionals. Some people are winners.”
Photos by Alex Landeen and Will Rice
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.