Please, if you can find a minute in your busy pre Christmas schedule, can you find me a fish in your sack , and kindly fix it to the hook on the end of my line. Just one will do fine.
Another Sunday short outing, another blank. Decided this weekend to head up to Wellsfield for a change, first time this year in fact. It’s only a few miles from home but it’s not a place I like that much, a bit too artificial looking thought they stock some huge fish. And they don’t allow Catch and Release so when you are done you are done. This point was made especially clear today when I arrived, to find the place very quiet indeed. The guy taking the money said to me that a chap had arrived at 10:30 on a four-hour ticket and was on his way to the car park having bagged up on three fish by 11:15. While I think we all appreciate an early fish I do like my four-hour session to last four hours, it’s not all about catching a bag limit, it’s just as much about being out in the fresh air and doing something you enjoy.
Just as bloody well for me, as after 4 hours of trying every likely tactic, I had not had so much as a knock.
The Upper Lochan at Wellsfield
The guy with the early exit had apparently caught on a mini Cats Whisker lure, and someone else had done well on a gold head Damsel apparently so I decided to start on a Damsel myself on point with a White Goldhead Zonker on dropper. I had the rig set up on a very long leader so I could fish well out on the 40+ floating line but still get the flies well down.
I was able to fish the various depths fairly easily with this but never contacted anything but the bottom and weed. I must have changed flies about 4 times before I decided to try a buzzer / straight line nymph set up on a sink tip line. I tied on a gold head black buzzer on point, with an Apps Bloodworm and an olive epoxy on dropper’s, again wasn’t getting anything on this. At one stage when I was clearly snagged on a little weed on the bottom I thought I felt a pluck but it wasn’t more than that. The odd fish was showing on the surface and hitting the shoals of small fry but it was infrequent and not recurring, I covered every fish I seen like this and had no reaction.
The Lower Lochan at Wellsfield
I put a buoyant fly on the point of the buzzer set up to try lift the flies over the weed, and this too seemed to work well as a method but it wasn’t attracting any interest.
I swapped flies to a Silver Invicta and a small brown damsel and fished this hoping to maybe attract a fry eater, but nothing came.
As the afternoon wore on it got very cold and a nasty wind got up. I had fished two banks of the top lochan before moving to the lower one but was finding the wind hard to cope with on my long leader so this was shortened and I ended up moving back to the top loch where the wind was more favourable and trying other colours, blobs blacks, greens, but nothing was getting any attention.
So I went home, empty-handed.
Again.
