I don’t know what it is about the prospect of having to work an (unexpected) night shift that pushes me out the door looking for my fishing rod. This is twice in recent times I have had night worked dumped on me and felt I needed to go and get some fresh air and the peace of some water before returning to face a night in front of a screen doing some highly stressful, fly by the seat of your pants change activity.
I threw together a few sandwiches, scoffed them down and then headed out the door, just along the road to Swanswater when I haven’t been for some wee while. I was there and ready to fish the last couple of hours and opted just to have a wee guddle in the Meadow Pond where at least you know the fish are in front of you and you don’t need to spend a couple of hours trying to locate them first before you even get onto thinking about fly patterns.
Alistair was there doing a bit of work around the stock ponds and gave me the update….he said it had been very dour, they were putting fish in and they were basically vanishing. In point of fact that’s not strictly true. Many of the fish in the ponds just now are Gold’s and you can see them right there, but catching one is an altogether different matter,
There was one angler opposite to me and in the couple of hours I was there he was the only person I saw hook a fish…it didn’t stay on unfortunately but he did at least get a short fight before it swam free. To be fair to the guy, he was I think a little distracted by a young family that stopped to chat with him and was explaining various aspects of the sport, including how to let the rod do the work when a fish was hooked. I couldn’t help notice his rod wasn’t taking that much strain as he was explaining and I suspect what he was saying and what he was actually doing got slightly out of sync! I know that feeling.
Alastair told me that dries were proving the most successful even when the fish weren’t rising in any obvious fashion. I must have tried about 16 different dry patterns all with zero interest shown including some Alistair said had been working. But the fish were rising in spells and there was enough happening to keep you interested, I certainly would not call it dour. I did notice they were pretty spooky and as soon as anyone started casting over the fish the rises stopped for 10-15 minutes. I tried many and various patterns some of which generally give me great confidence but not even a look. I tried a few sub-surface patterns as well with the same result and the only fly to get the fish at least following was unsurprisingly the wee golden damsel sparkly thing. They would follow it right across the pond, and the faster you stripped the faster they came but then lost interest every single time.
So by 9pm with the sun now setting and the midgies appearing, and the fish activity all but drying up I called it a night. Nice to be out but starting to forget what it’s like to have a fish on now!
