Flood Passerby Was a Whopper : Fish tale: CHP officer directing traffic scoops up a 35-pound carp swimming down Irvine Boulevard.

Officer Alvin Yamaguchi never dreamed that the biggest fish he would ever catch would be swimming down Irvine Boulevard.

The California Highway Patrol officer knows the fisherman’s pleasure of hooking prize bass or bonito and wrestling them to the deck of a deep-sea boat. But bagging a 35-pound carp on a flooded street was a first.

“It was humongous,” said Yamaguchi Thursday, retelling the story for the umpteenth time Thursday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Yamaguchi, 35, said the makings of his fish tale started several hours earlier. He and CHP Officer Bill Grant were assigned to the intersection of Irvine Boulevard and Lambert Road after torrential rainfall had turned the landscape into a seascape.

The two, wearing knee-high rubber boots, were directing drivers away from closed streets to passable routes, Yamaguchi said.

He was concentrating on the almost endless line of crawling cars when he heard his partner shouting next to him.

“He started yelling at me,” Yamaguchi said. “He said, ‘Look! It’s a bass! It’s a bass!’ I looked down and there was this great big fish.”

Yamaguchi acted as quickly as a Kodiak bear, scooping up the mammoth carp from the chocolate-colored water. The squirming fish almost got away, but the officer held on tight and threw it to drier ground.

Yamaguchi and Grant could not believe their eyes. “I had to take a picture,” Yamaguchi said. “No one would believe me.”

It’s not that nobody believed him, he said, but none of his fellow officers could keep a straight face when he told the fish story.

“Everyone was busting up,” Yamaguchi said.

The trophy was eventually turned over to Irvine public works employee Ralph Vargas, who wanted to show off the find to a group of avid fishermen who work in the city yard.

“The guys had to take a look at that one,” he said, and speculated that the fish made its way to civilization after one of several small reservoirs in the hillsides above Irvine overflowed and thousands of gallons of water cascaded downhill, spilling onto the street.

“I guess he just floated on down,” he said.

Vargas said he first considered stuffing the fish and displaying it at the yard as a trophy, but will instead bury it at the city yard.

He is disappointed that it is probably inedible. “If he was a bass, we’d probably eat him,” Vargas said. “Maybe make a lot of fish tacos.”