I am sure in the weighty annals of angling literature there will be a book somewhere that opens with the line. ” for successful angling, first find some fish”. If not let me know I might retain copyright on that for a future publication.
Indeed you might have the fishiest looking stretch of trout habitat on the face of the Earth but if there are in fact no fish there to catch, all the angling skill and perseverance in the world won’t help you catch them, and right now this particular stretch of the River Carron, the one I visited a couple of weeks back on a beautiful warm spring day seems somewhat devoid of not only fish but any sort of fly life too, very “difficult” to somewhat understate it. The weather of late has been fairly dry, so the river is probably on the lower side of its median levels, for the time of year, but there have been the odd day of pretty wet and one would have to say, unseasonably cold weather, which would have lifted water levels for a time and freshened things up ( if indeed they needed freshening. I don’t think really this is a factor as the water is still fairly cold and so holds copious quantities of Trout friendly oxygen saturated water). With the warmer drier spells you would think the fly life by now would be becoming abundant. We are nearly 5 weeks into a new season and even if the season was “late” arriving, not sure why as winter wasn’t especially harsh, there should still be plenty flies coming off, especially around the middle of the day. Up to the time of writing I have seen scarcely a midge venture out of the Carron. And sadly that seems to mean the fish aren’t showing themselves either.
You would imagine then that a wee nymph rolled on the bottom, or suspended under a buoyant fly like a Klinkhamer or Lifejacket Caddis would at least illicit some reaction from the trout, at least the odd knock, or the flash of gold burnished flanks as a fish looks and turns away in caution. Small olive or drab coloured wets too have to be worth a go.
I contacted a pal from LASAC, Tommy to see if he fancied an afternoon on the river, and he let me know he had already been down there around midday and sat for an hour to see if anything showed up, trout or fly life and in the absence of either decided better to spend the afternoon back home and didn’t bother even setting up a rod. But now I was asking he decided I think that if he was going to fish in vain, he might as well do it in company.
Tommy fishing a wee deep run where we know fish are usually resident- nada.
We met up around half two and were soon on the water, Tommy had a go in a section I like but he hadn’t tried his hand at before, a section that looks shallow but is in fact remarkably deep. But nothing showed, we then moved upstream fishing each section pretty thoroughly, with bugs, and dries and barely seen an insect, and never saw a trout. The odd swirl seen at a distance was likely an optical illusion of the sunlight on the water or maybe wishful thinking. We spoke to a couple of other anglers along the way and their experience was much the same. One had thought he had a few tentative knocks upstream but nothing concrete, and the other was saying they had caught a number of trout one evening while spinning for Salmon in slower deeper water downstream, and were of the thinking that a number of fish maybe those resident in the winter, had been washed downstream in winter floods. I am not sure what to make of that, my own feeling is it takes pretty serious flooding to knock fish down a river like that, they will tend to hunker down under some rock somewhere and stay put. What looks like a raging torrent on the surface will be pretty much situation normal on the bottom where friction makes the water travel much slower over the rocks and stones. Unless it gets to the stage where the bottom is actively being moved then the fish will be fairly secure. And we know the river has had one, if not two fresh stockings of farmed fish since around the beginning of the season.
So sad to say another disappointing blank, though an enjoyable few hours on the river in pleasant sunshine though it wasn’t as warm as it looked. We did see a pair of Kingfishers, which stood out on an otherwise bright but colourless day. Looking to get out again today for a few hours but though its sunny, there is a cold wind out side here, the river isn’t calling to me and my “free” stillwater options might be a bit on the cool side so if I go it might be to try get my line pulled by some stockies in a local fishery.
