“REAL!” I tell you!
I have been out wetting a line twice since my last post and on both occasions ( one on Loch the other on the River). On both outings I have been, lets say, piscatorialy challenged. Yes thats right, not a trout did I catch. It wouldn’t be true to say I caught nothing, on the loch I seemed to have an almost magnetic attraction to Perch. In mid summer doldrums when the trout are too busy trying to gasp for air from tepid waters, let alone inhale a fly, a wee Perch here and there can relive the boredom. In fact it can become a bit of a challenge to see how many you can net. But its still late Spring and the conditions ( at least on the evening I was out) were about ideal. It had been a warm day but not wall to wall blue sky, there was a nice ripple on the water and the Loch was devoid of other anglers but me. But not a Trout came my way. I never even saw one rise or give a clue of its presence.
If nothing else I got a decent bit of exercise in rowing around the loch. ( I still haven’t got a leisure battery for my outboard as I still don’t have a retirement income!….but thats another story best not to get me started on).
Onto the river
Then after a wee bit more of an unsettled feel to the weather this last week, and some decent falls of rain, I thought it might be worth another wee saunter down the river, and headed out mid-morning today. As soon as I looked at the water I knew in my heart it would be tough. The water was very coloured…. not quite chocolate brown but not merely “tea stained”. There were loads of guys out chucking spinners as well, not sure whether their quarry was salmon or trout, but I didn’t see any of them catch either and none reported fish when we spoke.
I felt I covered a decent amount of water given the conditions, and tried several bug variations none of which got me any interest. I fished a little larger than usual and tried several “flashy” patterns to try to get my flies seen but all I had to show for it was one tiny wee Smolt that seemed to have been left behind by its brothers and sisters that had probably headed for the estuary in the rainfall.
But getting to the point…
But none of this is the Struggle to which I refer in this entry’s title.
No, I write of something I am finding more and more is severely impacting my enjoyment of fishing. I refer to more of an ailment…not even my arthritis which has been better frankly, but that is what it is….of course I am meaning that age related disability… worsening Eye Sight.
It’s doing my f****** head in!
I can see just fine from anything a moderate to long distance away, the Optometrist ( my daughter-in-law) says I have near enough 20:20 vision in that regard, but anything near at hand, is little more than a messy blur. And herein lies the dilemma. I can’t see brilliantly wearing my reading specs beyond about arms length and if I force myself to wear them for longer range all I succeed in doing is straining my eyesight and then I can see nothing clearly with or without glasses! So I am forced to take them off to fish, then I have to don my polaroids so I can see where I am going in the water, then I get crud on my fly and the polaroids come off and I am hunting around in my pocket for my specs then I can’t find them. Then I spend like 20 minutes trying to thread on another fly convincing myself that yes this time I will get the 6X tippet through the hole on the size 16 hook.
And losing glasses….I could be a professional. How many pairs of glasses have I lost or broken?…don’t answer that Erin….too many! I have more empty glasses cases kicking around the house than I have flies in my fly boxes….OK maybe that’s an exaggeration but there are loads….I threw out about 4 or 5 empty cases the other week as I was so fed up picking up another empty one.
I had varifocals, they were supposed to let me see at range but do close range stuff when necessary. Now I tried really hard to get on with them….especially as they cost me about £200, I really tried, “really”. But I struggled with them on all the time, I always felt slightly off somehow when trying to walk around with them on. So then I just kept them for rare social occasions…like reading a menu when I was out…. and fishing…and then guess what?
Yes, I lost them too. I think I left them on a train a few weeks back, that’s the last place I recall having them and all I can think of.
But when I am out on the water all this swapping glasses, on off, on off again, forgetting which pocket I have put them in, then spending 5 minutes going through pockets stuffed with leaders, fly boxes, tippets, everything but reading glasses ( or polaroids!) then finding I put them down on the bank or in the pocket of my waders…because I will remember…then I forget….
I need a new head….actually can that order be extended to just a new body please.
As somebody who can’t see a thing, near or far, with out glasses and having worn them all my life it’s hard for me to imagine the problems people new to glasses seem to have. Despite wearing varifocals I’ve had to add some flip-down magnifiers to tie flies on.
You know I think there is a lot of truth in what you say. I was told. When I started to need glasses, initially just for screen reading in my late 50s that my eyes were better than really I had any right for them to be at my age. But the rub is when you are used to decent eyesight, almost as an automatic “right” when that entitlement is taken away you take it much worse. And I think really that’s my problem. Suddenly I am struggling with something I took for granted for so long. I should be grateful my eyes have been and relatively speaking still are, pretty good. But when you are trying for 20 minutes to thread on that size 16 fly in the dusk my gratitude soon disappears