I admit it hasn’t been a full season of fishing for me this year. The early part of the season was impossibly dry, the rivers were like puddles and the Loch was a 30 metre walk over the dried-out stoney bottom to reach the water’s edge. And the fish just weren’t making themselves known. But then July came, this “sinusoidal 5 wave jetstream” took over and we have been stuck in weather that is at best Autumnal but with the usual July downpours and more oddly, very high winds. But this has at least brought the temperatures down which should you would think, help the angling…if that wind would just drop and the ever-present threat of a soaking would just clear off for a bit.
Now the weather is a large part of my “excuse” for a lack of fishing but other things have been needing my attention too I admit so getting free time and a lull in the weather to align has been rare. But it did on Tuesday evening, sort of, and while I had to make it a very short session, barely 2 hours, as I had to start my work again at night, I made it onto the banks of Loch Coulter for a cast. I know, July can be the pits at the best of times around these parts for fly fishing but time was available and it was time to get out.
Well, more properly I made it to the edge of the water…the bank was a good 20 metres behind me as the water is still very low even after the amount of rain we have had this last 3 weeks or so. The sky was somewhat foreboding though and to be honest, really amounted to all the drama that came my way.
There was a wee bit of a southerly breeze hitting me square on in the face when I first set up and it was sure to make casting tricky, straight into it, but it did relent and turn a little more westerly as the sunset beckoned. But other than that the conditions looked pretty ideal, but for the total absence of fish moving. I will say that just after I started casting one pretty large trout porpoised right in front of me maybe 30 metres out and I tried to cover it to no effect. I had equipped myself with the Snowbee Extreme line which is effectively a manufactured shooting head, and it allowed me to make a decent range into the wind, That said I was getting the odd wind knot as well in the fairly light fluorocarbon I was using. I could maybe have used something a bit stiffer in the conditions.
But for that all I managed were Perch, first a couple where I started then I noticed a fish rise just out from the edge of the water near the dam wall, and I moved as stealthily as I could to cover it with a dry fly ( god loves a trier they say) and I hooked another Perch on that. The Perch is a bonnie wee fish but sometimes when you keep catching tiny wee ones, they just become a total nuisance, and I admit I dislike handling the spiney wee critters.
The feeling of pointlessness I admit, did overwhelm me and without seeing another fish I packed up and headed home just inside a couple of hours.
The skies though remained dramatic and having my camera with me I got a few shot of that, so it wasn’t a total waste of an evening. I did notice that catches seemed sparse in the returns book and I was watching the Osprey search fruitlessly for a fish and then fly off so it wasn’t just me!
