Sunday, 13th July

Loch Leven, Evening Session

Although conditions during the day were appalling (cloudless sky and scorchio), the evening settled down quite nicely.  Some cloud came in from the west to catch the dropping sun (though as soon as we were out on the water, the westerly was replaced by a 180 degree turn-round to an easterly sea breeeze!).  The water was still clear and there was a fair bit of fly about.  Things looked pretty good, although there was a disappointing number of boats out to try to take advantage of it all.

First of our boats to get into action was Alan M and Stu B, who fished at Kelson Strip.  Some early offers pulling were shelved in favour of getting onto dries, and Alan took a thumper of a brownie, estimated at over 4 lb (the fish was returned alive), to a Shipman's buzzer.

Alan M with a lump of a brownie -- it's what you're there for!  (photo by Stu B)

By mid evening, most of our rods had gone onto dries (in our case it was after drawing a complete blank with both pulling and nymphing), as the wind dropped to an oily calm.  That got a semi-serious Caenis hatch on the go, but it brought about a completely different response from the fish, depending on your exact whereabouts.  Jimmy M and JSB fished at Dunlop bay and the fish there were in Caenis mode, making them typically difficult to distract with artificial offerings.

Less than half a mile west, John W and I fished at the south deeps buoy, and although we had the Caenis, the fish were ignoring them, making them much easier to tempt with our dries.  Black Shipman's, ginger Shipman's, claret half-hog and orange raider were top patterns, with claret F-fly and ginger hopper all taking fish.  A further discontinuity we found was that west of the buoy it was all just 8-inch brownies and we had to go back upwind to the east side of the buoy to get into better sized fish.  The move paid off when John's last fish tipped the scales at 3 lb 12 oz.

John W with the first fish of the evening

Elsewhere, John G took a good brownie to a big, skated deerhair sedge.  Eric B took 2 good rainbows to Dunkelds, fished on intermediate over the south deeps.  Also fishing wets, John M took a bag of 3 for over 6 lb on Kate McLaren, and bloody and kingfisher butchers.  John was fishing an intermediate from the west point to the south deeps.

The club's total for 12 rods was 8 rainbows for 17 lb, 3 browns for 4 lb 3 oz, plus 8 sizeable fish and many small brownies returned.