Return to the Hills

I am on holiday this week and as long as the body bears up the week is open for fishing as the other half is working. Being an ( English) Bank Holiday I though a lot of places might be busy Monday, so decided to have one of my once or twice a season outings up to the burn in the hills. We have had quite a dry spell of late so I was keeping everything crossed that it wouldn’t be too low.  It’s a hard wee water to read, I have seen days you would rate as bankers and never seen a fish and others where you think you might struggle and  end up with a hat full. Now it’s fair to say hat full is probably literally correct, and a small hat at that. The fish in the burn are not big though the odd surprise sometimes shows. My biggest to date has been around the 3/4 to a pound mark and he took me a couple of “visits” to fool onto my fly.

For me 90% of fishing is, as angling celebrity Paul Young once said on Hooked on Fishing, about the take. And the take from a wee wild brownie is every bit as exciting as any moderate sized fish. I guess the exception comes when you see a big fish and cast in anticipation of hooking it, but I get as much if not more excitement catching wee wild fish in a burn as stockies in a Commercial fishery and a rare bigger fish is something to celebrate.

It was a gorgeous day, mostly T Shirt order, but with tons of sun lotion on, and a lightweight wading jacket, some flies, rod ( including my Tenkara pole) and an assortment of camera’s I decided to head to the hills, take it slow with frequent rests for the feet, and to take photos and hopefully end up with a decent wee video too. Things didn’t quite go according to plan on the latter front and I discovered one of my wee video cameras was missing an SD card so this led to some juggling of cards and cameras and resulted in me losing the best bit of the day!

Not to worry I salvaged something from the other snippets and hopefully you enjoy a few minutes with me in the hills above. I also had the opportunity to try out my underwater housing for my Gopro that give much clearer shots sub surface. I was lucky to be able to see a  number of stoneflies hatch off during the day and make ungainly strides over the meniscus trying to reach safety. As far as I could se the trout were not the hazard, but wee sticklebacks with eyes bigger than their bellies were keen to have a go! I must have seen a dozen over the day and captured one on the camera in the video attached. I also did a bit sampling to get some bugs from the bottom and put them in a wee petri dish to photograph under a macro lens. This turned out an interesting exercise though maybe not so good for the bugs. Having recovered some stone-clingers from some rocks and placed them safely in some water on my petri dish  I then found a stonefly nymph which I dropped in the dish too. Carnage! before I could retrieve my camera the stonefly nymph had slaughtered one of the “clingers” and soon murdered two! The photo’s though came out OK.

All the way down the burn – I decided to walk down and fish back upstream, I rarely seen a fish and was starting to worry maybe a bare day was ahead, also the many of the sections I favour were very, very low. It took me a fair while of walking and resting to reach the starting point for my fishing, and rested and watered I decided to start with my Tenkara outfit as the water was so low at a favourite spot. I edged close to the deepest area and tried my nymphs through the run ( which was barely moving to be fair ) but never got a touch. I tried conventional dries here too after the nymphs and though not expecting much did see one fish rise though not to my fly.

I lost my wee CDC olive on a tuft of grass somewhere as my 1Kg tippet was too puny to survive me trying to unsnag it, so having had no interest I tied on a size 16 black Parachute fly with a Peacock herl thorax.

At the next pool I spotted fish rising near a tree and managed to fool a tiny wee trout, then another in one of the feeder pools. Well, not a blank! And so it went on, as I slowly made my way upstream I picked up one or two fish, one was actually a decent size, not “take-able” ( if that’s your thing, I return them all ) by any means but fun on a light set up. Eventually at one of the deeper runs I was wading my way up. To get some idea of how deep, I was fishing with my chesties on, but folded down and secured with the belt at my waist. As I worked up this pool, I suddenly remembered I didn’t have my waders fully up! I reckon one inch more would have resulted in catastrophic flooding. I was right at the top! I edged slowly backwards and exited. It was pretty deep! As i had waded and fished and picked up one small fish, there was a BIG splash ahead and I was sure there was a larger fish around. I had a camera set up ahead to film the action and initially i thought I must have spooked the fish as it didn’t come to my fly where i thought I seen it. The the subtlest of takes and I was into a really decent fish.  After a great wee fight, it took me all over the pool and nearly broke me on some bankside snags, I netted a great fish – the second biggest I have ever caught up there and, had it all on video, still I have learned by past mistakes, and took a few quick photos before resting and safely returning the wild brownie to the stream. All the way up I told the wee fish to get their daddy, see, they were listening!

I went to check the video and it seemed OK but when I pressed a button in review mode it said “saved” somewhat unexpectedly. Later I think what I had done was clipped the sections in error and bloody lost any useable footage! Bugger!

Over the course of the afternoon I caught 11 fish, and was I to have bagged them up and weighed them all together I reckon I would be lucky to reach a pound and a half! All the fish took the wee black Parachute fly, I lost one but had spares luckily! It was great fun, and the feet and legs lasted the course quite well though the last half mile was a struggle with sore hips and a slightly swollen left hand but small sacrifices must be made!