Friday, 30th June
Portmore Loch, Evening Session
One evening at Portmore we will get nice settled weather of a sort conducive to good fishing. One evening... maybe... but this wasn't it. It was quite decent during the day -- gentle breeze, warm and cloudy. When we arrived, the wind was blowing quite stiff, down the loch, as usual, but it dropped away nicely as the evening progressed. As we started out, the rain came on. Still not too bad. However, no sooner had the rain gone off, but the 100% ceiling dissipated in what seemed like seconds, until only the horizon had any cloud. All we had was a big orange arc lamp burning down onto us. The rain had cleared the air as well, so it was about as bright as it gets!
We had pretty much all decided to fish dries too. The reports were that dries were the best bet, and, even though the sun nearly ruined the middle part of the evening (there were one or two caught then), most folk seemed happy to sit and wait, rather than do much experimenting downstairs. The water was high, with a bit of ball algae building up, but the underlying clarity was very good. Fly hatches consisted of a few of everything -- terrestrials, buzzers, sedges and Caenis. Spoonings showed same -- a little of everything.
Fraser Gault and Alan Duncan drift the south-east shore
The evening's sport fell into 2 camps. One option was to stick it out all evening up the top, where there was no great rise, but there were little groups of fish popping up here and there throughout the evening. Mike Phillips and guest Colin McLean went with that and, after a slow start, they finally got going with black F-fly and black Klinkhammer.
Tommy Steven nets one that took a detour through the salad
The second option was to fish up the top until the last hour or so, and then to go down to the area from the old car park to the dam, and cash-in on the late rise of sedge feeders. Fraser Gault and Alan Duncan went with this, taking 9 between them to elk hair emerger patterns in golden olive and claret. They reported a terrific late rise out in the middle, up from the dam.
Mike Phillips brings in a cracker for Colin McLean
Dougie Skedd and Tommy Steven also went with the split area approach, and they had top boat with 11, taken on half-hog, claret hopper, claret Shipman and sparkle gnat. Cap'n F chipped-in with fish to half-hog, claret Klinkhammer and a big orange thorax Cove PTN (OK, not everyone was patient enough to avoid experimenting downstairs).
The club's total for 10 rods was 29 fish.
Photos: Canon 10D with 70-300mm IS lens and polarising filter
If you are wondering, the IS stands for image-stabilisation. Going long with the zoom (in the 200mm to 300mm range) magnifies blur caused by movement -- and there's lots of movement flying about in my shots. My hands are trying unsuccessfully to hold the camera still. The boat I'm in is rocking. The boat the subjects are in is rocking. The subjects are moving about... And so it goes on. My boat partners don't know it, but they have an uncanny knack of casting just as I'm trying to press the shutter, which of course causes the boat to rock even more. The answer is to keep the shutter speed fast: 1/200s or faster is recommended at 200mm; 1/300s at 300mm, and so on. The problem is that with less than pro-quality lenses (the one involved here is already at f5.6, wide open at 300mm), in low light conditions you just can't reach those shutter speeds. (Canon do a 300mm prime lens that opens to f2.8. Yours for a little over £4000... and you can only take shots at 300mm with it!)
Increasing the ISO to 400 or 800 helps speed things up, but image quality starts to suffer -- especially in low light (Doh!). Add a polarising filter and that's another 2 stops of speed gone.
Enter image-stabilisation. The lens actually detects the movement of the camera and moves the lens elements internally to compensate. It gives you the equivalent steadiness of a shutter speed 2 to 3 stops faster than the one you are using. The shot of Fraser and Alan above was at 300mm and the shutter speed was 1/60s. The shot of Colin and Mike was at 240mm and had a shutter speed of 1/30s. That's slow enough to give hand shake blur. However, image stabilisation has allowed a steady shot to be captured. Note that these speeds were just fast enough not to blur the anglers, but were slow enough to catch the movement in Fraser's rod and the wobble in Colin's fly line. That's all just down to trial and error, not judgment on my part -- the dose of shots that went in the bin will testify to that!
