It is late June and we have long days and short nights. If you could call the dusk period between about 11pm and 3am “night”. I usually like to get out for an early start around this time but have been struggling for time recently between the ever-continuing chaos vortex of work, the weather, and having neatly slashed my pinkie last weekend requiring an impromptu visit to A&E to get the skin fixed down with numerous steri-strips. Stitches would have been appropriate in most similar cases but they said they would likely cause as much damage as they fixed on the back of my wee finger, there not being a lot of “meat” for a stitch to get hold of. Thankfully it’s healing up fine, and I think I can keep it reasonably dry (as instructed), and it doesn’t hurt too much, just doesn’t bend so easily. So with a lovely evening last night (Thursday), and little wind, it was reasonably warm for once (there was a distinct chill and it was quite windy on Wednesday evening) I grabbed the chance to go fish.
My plan was a spot of dry fly fishing (hopefully) at Coulter from the bank as getting a boat set up is usually a time-consuming chore in the evening.
But when I arrived there were no boats out at all, so two on the pier, the wind was gentle and blowing towards the pier anyway, so simply taking a boat and rowing was an option and I decided to take it.
I rowed over the bay and spied the one other angler out at Poachers Point wading from the shore- had I opted to bank fish that was likely where I would have headed myself, so another reason to use the boat. Not until I neared the far bank did I get any indication of fish moving when I heard rather than saw, a slap of a fish somewhere around me….in towards the weeds it transpired.
I was still to rig up my rod but put on a floating line, tapered leader and a wee olive emerged to start with.
The rises were there but they were isolated affairs..a fish would rise 20 or 30 metres from the front of the boat, then another 10metres behind, then one 5 metres to the side….then it would go quiet for a bit. After a few minutes, a fish would rise 40 metres away again. The one common theme was that the fish were moving fast, you could hear the plop of air being sucked in and often the rises were scrappy, slappy, skite along the surface affairs. Whatever they were taking was something they thought may escape. Frankly, I had little to no clue what they were after, certainly nothing numerous and visible thus far.
I spied a few wee Caenis about but not in any numbers. I saw a few sedges, just one here and one there and the odd black-gnat-like midge but there was nothing you could easily identify as being the food source.
I swapped from an emerger to a small black Bob’s Bits, to an Olive Sedgehog, to a small size 18 black midge then an even smaller Split wing CDC pattern somewhat reminiscent of a Caenis. At a size 22 or 24 this was a tiny fly but arguably to be really replicating actual Caenis you need to go smaller still.
I had one fish rise to the Bob’s Bits but it never actually touched the fly so no take as such. As the sun dropped in the sky the wind too dropped leaving the loch flat calm, rarely ideal, so the individual rise forms ceased making way for the obvious supping behaviour of fish hoovering up Caenis.
By this time I had moved onto the very small flies.
The biggest issue with all this was that despite rowing nearer to where the action was, the fish then always seemed to be a good 20 to 30 metre cast away and that’s far from ideal with minuscule flies you can barely see in your hand, never mind 90 feet away on the surface of a mirror flat and reflective loch. I have no reason to imagine I was in any way spooking the fish as I was rowing then drifting, and I think we have all seen fish rise beside a moving boat motoring under power- they are rarely affected by a boat.
On one cast I managed to put the fly within maybe 4 feet of a continually rising fish and in the path it seemed to be heading. All I needed to do was wait for the fish to move towards my fly ( which it was doing) and pick it up. However, the fly was a long way away and trying to judge if the fish had taken it was near enough impossible..I think impatience maybe got the better of me. It rose what seemed to be at my fly. I lifted but all that actually appeared to do was pull the fly towards me. The fish lunged at it as it moved in front but I had already pulled the fly away. A clear miss on my part but frankly it was near impossible to strike in a timely fashion at such long range.
I slowly rowed my way back to the pier stopping to cover the rising fish which were by now gorging on the spent bodies of Caenis. The water along the dam side to the pier was a raft of the dead flies and with such a huge harvest to be had why a fish need concern itself with anything other than a perfect replica is anyones guess. But I tried and failed.
The catch return book seems to indicate it isn’t just me that struggled though!
