Procrastination: the enemy of the winter angler.
The forecast I had seen for Sunday suggested a better day than Saturday. Saturday was probably better than I would have expected, so with no clear plan for fishing, I hoped I might make it out at some point. I have had a lot of Fridays off recently but those days have mostly been tied up with other tasks I needed to get done, though getting out to spin for Pike last week made a wee bit of a change.
What else was there to do?
Come Sunday morning, however, I was very disappointed to see it quite wet and pretty cold in that gusty wind and initially parked my fishing thoughts. I was finding it hard to get motivated to head out as frankly it was so cold. I stood on the front step in a thin jacket and thought….”could I bear 4 hours of this?” with the addition of wet hands…. initially I retired back inside and moped about for a bit. I put a thicker jacket on and went out again. if anything it was windier, you could hear the wind whistling through the trees. Never a good sign…. but then looking at the clock, there were 4 hours to kill until dinner time this evening, what exactly was I going to be doing until then? That made up my mind, and I packed my gear into the car, a short jaunt to Swanswater would do. As my wife reminded me, you can sometimes get a bit of shelter from the wind there.
On days like these though, shelter is hard to find. If asked, honestly I couldn’t tell you what direction the wind was blowing from. It swirled and swung around angrily with each gust and got worse as the day wore on. Alistair at the lodge was saying the fish were moving round in pods and the fishing could be very good if you could locate them. He said they had all been hanging around the bridge to the Island on Friday and there had been some big bags from there, yet on Saturday, not a fish was caught in that same spot. He said on Sunday most so far had been caught along the dam wall and mostly to pulled lures.
I had thought the fishery might be open until 18:00 as it’s getting lighter now in the evenings but they were still shutting at 5 pm so basically, I had only a couple of hours to get a fish! Nothing like pressure! Sometimes it can take a few hours to find a fly and a method and a location where it all works… and let’s not forget the fish need to be switched on as well.
From when I arrived I didn’t see any fish caught. Most of the anglers seemed to be lining the eastern bank, I presumed in the belief it was more sheltered, and it probably was but only marginally so. The “cage” on the dam wall was free so I went up there and fished a floating line with a heavy lure on the point here for a while but not a touch did I get. I then changed to an Intermediate line but didn’t make any significant difference to my success rate with that either. No one else seemed to be catching, the lad nearest the dam wall told me he had had three earlier on but it had since gone quiet and I saw a young lad come away from the peg by the outflow with two fish though I never witnessed him catch them in the time I was there.
Casting was at best erratic on the dam wall. One cast would be carried out a long way by the wind, the next would see the head of the line suddenly lifted by a gust, and the fly and line would hover only 20 feet from the rod tip as the rest of the line continued to run through the rod rings, and inevitably it all landed in a heap.
Time to Move
If the fish had been by the dam wall, they were either sulking, further out beyond casting range, ( which was very variable depending on the wind) or had moved off somewhere else. I took a gamble on the latter and took a walk around to the island. I had this entire side of the loch to myself, the wind appeared to be putting everyone off, though in point of fact it was no harder to cast here than anywhere else, it was just gusty and swirly and at any moment you felt you might end up with the line wrapped around your head.
I fished into the channel managing to reach right across under the trees on the far bank but nothing seemed interested, then working towards the dam wall direction and the more open water of the main basin suddenly on one retrieve, the line simply stopped. There was no “grab” or obvious take, it all just locked solid, I lifted automatically and was hooked into a Rainbow Trout. At first glance, it looked like a fairly typical “2lb-something” fish but it felt much heavier and was noticeably big and fat when it finally reached the net. At this point I will add, I managed to forget my own net when I packed up my gear so was using a net borrowed from the fishery, I would guess the fish, though short for the weight was comfortably over 3lbs.
The fish took a small Cats Whiskers on an Intermediate line. I moved round to the corner of the island and almost immediately had a couple of plucks at the fly. In every case just as the fly started to edge up into shallower water before recommencing the re-cast. About 4 or 5 casts in it again stopped…. then started again and simply didn’t feel right. So I lifted it out and my suspicions were confirmed. I had just been broken off. I will say, I was fishing with 6lb tippet as it was what I had on the last time I was out when fishing dry fly that time. I probably should have gone heavier when fishing small lures but with only 2 hours I was rushing a bit and decided it would suffice. In this case clearly not.
With a fresh 8lb leader on and a new fly on the point, I decided to try a small variant of a Yellow Dancer as I didn’t have any identical Cats Whiskers to the type I had been fishing. My suspicion was that the fish probably weren’t that fussy were you to locate them and I think I was proven right by events. The wind was swirling and whipping around and I needed to time the cast between gusts, hoping I could get a line out before a gust might blow it back or into me. I also had to turn my back on the water and cast backward as forward casting was becoming too dangerous with a real risk of getting hit by the fly as it passed your head. With the line out a good distance and nice and straight, the exact same thing happened, with a pluck just at the end of the retrieve, but this time I felt the fish and was able to get a hook set. Right away it felt altogether heavier, with that dead weight kind of fight that suggests a bigger fish. The few short glances I was able to get of the fish, as frankly it stayed deep, made me think maybe this was a fish about 4lb or so, though it did feel heavier. The fight wasn’t what you would call, explosive, more just dogged hanging back. The fish though did me a favour by heading up the channel back towards where I had left the net on the bank which let me get some slack in and to put a few clicks of drag on the reel. Now it was just a persistence game, I had no particular reason to rush things, and eventually, I got its head up and went to get it in the net. Now there was a problem as frankly, the net was really too small for a fish this size. It was a lump.
I weighed it in the net and while I was rushing a bit and didn’t get an accurate reading as I really did not want to remove the fish from the water for longer than totally necessary, it was a good bit over 8lb in the net. Taking the weight of the net into account, the fish was likely in the 7lb- 7.5lb class. That is probably the biggest fish I have caught at Swanswater for quite some time so well worth coming out for on such a wild day!
I left the fish head first in the net, it was hopeless thinking it would recover when folded nearly in half and after a few minutes of recovery time which I spent sorting out my leader in readiness to cast again, I slipped the net away from the fish and it simply swam off. Big fish take a wee while to get ready to return else they simply go belly up.
I returned to the corner and simply did the same thing again. Again I had a few obvious plucks at the end of the retrieve before one more time it just held firm and once more a fish was on. Again like the first, at first glance, it looked like a typical 2lb stockie, but once it was eventually in the net again it was a very broad fish and was comfortably over 3lb. However, the power in this fish was of a different class altogether and it wins the prize for the fight of the day. No sooner would I gain some line on it, than it was heading off at speed stripping-off line from the reel. This one took the longest of all to get to the net and even once netted seemed full of vigour and was off like a rocket as soon as it spied a hint of freedom.
I was very glad I opted to head out in the conditions after all.
