Was a cracking day yesterday and having the day off was keen to get out for a few hours. I took a run up to Pendriech but it was pretty busy (by its standards) and the wind was blowing right into the dam end. As the most easily fished area was going to be the south bank and most of the anglers were already there I decided to cut my losses and head elsewhere. So I waited a few hours and went up to Swanswater to catch the last of the sun’s rays and hopefully get the evening rise (if there was one).
It was pretty quiet when I arrived around four thirty, most of the “day shift” already having departed, and I decided to fish the main loch, stopping along the east bank as much to catch the rays as anything. I initially put a hothead damsel on with a sink tip line as I figured in the sun the fish would be deep. The damsel, however, wasn’t playing the game and wasn’t sinking (its plastic bead on the end) so I took it off and put on a wee beaded nymph pattern on point and a red holo Diawl Bach on dropper. A slow, slow retrieve- almost static and I felt a bump, fish on! A nice fight and a blue trout of around 2lb was netted. Was actually nice to have a bit weight on the end of the rod after the smaller fish at Pendreich recently.
While I could have persevered here, with it being so quiet I decided to move on and moved over near the island just before the bridge.
A few small fish were moving but it’s fairly shallow here and I never touched anything. After ten minutes I decided to move to the shady side of the island- the corner facing the roadside platforms. The wind was making casting tricky into the channel but I felt if the fish were lying deep this was a good spot and out the sun.
Sure enough, I was getting a lot of bumps and tugs but no solid takes. There were loads of caddis moving on the bottom of the pond so I put on a weighted caddis pattern and fished dead slow, after losing a whole cast and two flies to the overhanging trees opposite.
Tug, tug, then eventually a take and a really nice stong rainbow was on just shy of three pounds on the red holo Diawl Bach again.
By now smaller fish were rising all over the shallow water between the two islands and I could not resist a wee play with the dry fly so I put a Parachute Adams on my Orvis HyFlote 2X leader and gave it a go. I picked up a couple of very small brown trout- clearly wild ones but no bigger fish- they are all sulking! The fish were taking very small midges but I wasn’t able to raise a fish on a small Shit Fly for some reason.
Decided to finish my evening up down at the Millpond where I had a fun 30 mins trying varying emerger patterns to the finicky fish but not catching any- managed to miss one but that was it. Great fun.
