Sunday, 31st August

Glencorse Reservoir, Day Session

This was the second tough outing on Glencorse in the space of a couple of weeks.  Last time it was easy to blame the turbid water after all the rain.  This time it was difficult to apportion blame, although the weather certainly didn't help.  It started OK, calm and overcast, but showers quickly developed, and then they turned into constant rain.  George told us the fish had been rising all over on Saturday, but we saw very few, and what we saw were rarely up more than once.It was do-able to sit with dries out and bring up an occasional fish.  Stewart Barnes was by far the most successful with this tactic, and he top-scored with a bag of 5, taken to nothing fancier than a size 14 black Bob's bits.  Just reward for applied patience.  (Sorry Stewart - no photographic record of your success - rain and cameras = bad combination.)

I went with the same tactic and had one of those days where, what few fish you draw don't quite go away with the fly and shut their mouth on it.  You are left trying to work out why.  Fly pattern?  Changed that.  Presentation?  Same as always - and I've been in decent form with dries this year.  Leader material?  Well, I have been on my trusty Tectan, but I'm not claiming it is infallible.  Stewart was on fluoro - a nemesis of mine when it comes to dries.  But I was willing to give it another experiment.  I changed to fluoro, but far too late in the day.  It did get me a late brownie and I'll save that idea for next time...

John Miller gets his string pulled (1/30 sec!)

The one other thing that seemed strange...  at one stage I put on a size 12 claret hopper, and quickly had one, two, three fish have a go without a connection, then a fourth, which did connect.  It bust the rib on the fly, so I changed it for another size 12 claret hopper.  And it never had an offer!  What's all that about?

Is that a yawn, John?

I should probably have tried a complete change of tactics, but when you are sitting there in the rain, and know that if you make the switch, everything is going to get soaked, you tend to put the idea on the back-burner.  Besides, word coming from the others was that nothing much else was working either.  So, I sat there most of the afternoon with my thumb up my arse.

Speaking of the others, dries was the best bet anyway. John Wastle had 3 to a black hopper.  John Levy had 3 takeable browns and a rainbow to a dry daddy-long-legs, fished along the road shore.  Trevor had a brace to dry heather fly, also along the road shore.  The rest were ones and zeros.

John Levy: success on a daddy

No particular area stood out - in fact the fish were spread about as evenly as it is possible to spread fish over a water - particularly one with such variable depth as Glencorse.

The Club's 12 rods landed 20 fish.

Photos: Canon 40D with (image 1) 24-105 IS and (images 2, 3, 4) 70-200 f4 IS lenses