Sunday, 20th August

Coldingham Loch, Day Session

As you'll see from the shot above, the first part of the day was obscured by clouds.  The second part of the day was the same, but with added rain.  Eventually, the rain abated, and the cloud lifted, and it was really quite decent in the afternoon.  The sunny spells were quite welcome, helping as they did both to dry things out, and to warm things up.  The water was as crystal clear as ever.  If you are wondering what the contraption is in the left of frame above, Douglas has invested in a weed cutter.  As you can see, it has been busy, and yet there are still areas that are very heavily weeded -- that stuff does grow quickly.  The top arm had plenty fish, but with all the weed about, conversion rates were often poor, with many being lost in thick salad.

Bob Allan, with the first of the day, taken in the pea soup

Bob Allan and I started by drifting in the main basin, with Bob on floater and Diawl Bachs, and me on dries (Adams hopper and dark F-fly).  There were plenty fish moving and we quickly went to 2 apiece -- pea soup or no pea soup.  However, it kind of dried up on us after that.  We stopped seeing rises too.  After much fruitless to-ing and fro-ing, we went up to the top of the west arm.  We were the only boat up there at that time, and we were seeing fish again.  However, they did not respond to our advances.  We noticed that a lot of the rises were of the enthusiastic, surging type.  This occurred to us in conjunction with the fact that Bob had started catching loads of very small perch on his Diawl Bachs.  Putting 2 and 2 together...  well, we had to give it a try at least.  I went with 2 pearly nymphs and a minkie, while Bob just replaced his tail fly with an orange tadpole.  And we had success -- with the minkie and the tadpole.  We even had fish covering the risers that had refused the dries.  Were they full of perch fry?  Don't know -- one of the downsides of fishing catch and release. 

A wee cutie.  One of dozens of perch fry we took on all manner of patterns

However, having got to 11 between us by 2 p.m., we ran out of steam -- apart from adding a keep-net's worth of perch to our catch.  Some caught on the minkie were barely larger than the fly!  There was another boat up the arm, with 3 fishers in it, not of our club, and they did very well, fishing at anchor.  They certainly kept the score board ticking over after we stopped.  The word was that they were on Montanas!  Go figure (1).

We needed to get back on track.  When I had been on dries earlier, I had noted that several times I had been lifting off to go into a back cast when a fish had rushed at the flies (on one occasion 2 fished rushed in tandem).  Maybe they wanted moving dries.  I went with it: a sedgehog, an Adams hopper and a black Klinkhammer, figure-of eighted across the top.  Straight away I started to get follows, swirls, fish mouthing the flies... everything but a solid take.   This continued right up to finishing time, without either of us adding to our score.

Jim Tait and Stewart Barnes drift the north shore

Now, about 3.30 p.m., Tommy Steven arrived up the west arm, having fished all day further down the loch for one fish.  He had no sooner arrived than he was into one.  Then another, and another, and so it went on.  He would have had a great catch had he not been fishing in the weediest corner of the loch, and he must have lost 2 for every one he landed.  When we came in, I was curious to know, what had he been doing?  Figure of eighting dries (half hog and pearly bibio) was the answer!  Go figure (2).  One difference I noticed from the scorecards was that Tommy was on fluoro, while I was on double-strength.  Hmmm???

Other catches: Trevor had a brace to a black ethafoam beetle.  Boyd Scott and guest Nicky Rivers had 4 to Blakestone's buzzer and dry daddy.  Jim Tait had 4 to CDC, snatcher and perch fry.

The Club's 12 rods caught 26 fish

Photos: Canon 10D with 28-135 IS lens.  A +4 close-up filter was added for the shot of the perch.