The Hunt for Red Carptober

I know, you did nothing to deserve being subjected to that title, but it was fun.

Tamer's Log - Day 2

It's the second day of my fishing trip across Pandaria in search of the four elusive carp pets and so far I've caught a Tiny Green Carp. That was on day 1, so overall I'm not terribly upset, but day 2 was absolutely brutal.



Swarms of fish appeared in Inkgill Mere and I tackled that lake at full force, still exhilerated by my previous victory. Unfortunately, it quickly became evident that my plan to turn non-carp fish into Ironpaw tokens wasn't going to work today - only spinefish are caught in the area and spinefish are only used by alchemists, so no groceries. This is a problem for me because I no longer get to feel like I'm making progress at something even if it's not the thing I was hoping to advance, so now every cast that doesn't reel in a precious carp, which was all of them today, feels like time not-so-well wasted.

There were many such 'wasted' casts. I vendored about a dozen stacks of spinefish for 5 gold per stack, destroyed a large-but-unknown amount fish bones from missed casts, gave half a dozen stacks of spinefish to a deathknight I met fishing nearby, mailed said deathknight another half a dozen stacks, and went on to vendor and destroy more dozens of stacks of spinefish. By the time I quit for the day, I had single-handedly emptied out four large pools in addition to all the fish I caught in between.

So I see three possibilities here concerning my luck with this one:
1) I was very lucky yesterday with the green carp,
2) I was very unlucky today with the red carp, or
3) I'm doin' it wrong.

I could be doing it wrong. The pet journal doesn't say anything about Kun-Lai, but it is the same kind of fish, right? Besides, Salty El said so.

I'm sure that the reason I'm so insufferable on this one is because I had a plan that would help me tolerate the grind but that plan disappeared in a cloud of smoke the second I arrived. I searched for other ways to tolerate it; I queued in the raid finder and now I've finally fought every Pandarian raid boss, and I even won a new helm for my hunter, but it didn't work to distract me from the grind. I'll need to find a way, though, because I will be tackling this one again and perhaps again after that until I get my carp, which I will then promptly rename to Red Carptober.