The weather for our second Lake outing was nowhere near as bad as forecast. There was a bit of rain in the afternoon, but we got off lightly, and benefitted from 100% ceiling all day. The wind was south-easterly and altough never strong, it was annoyingly swirly when trying to keep tight to the head of it to fish dries.
Jimmy Millar and i set out to see what we could do on dries and, although we set up a second rod at various times, we never really used them. A decent buzzer hatch got going, but there was not the expected number of rising fish getting on to them. Really, the only fish rising were tight to the reeds, from Lochend, right along by Tod hole, the Butts and round to Chicken Leg. We concluded this was because that was where all the fish were lying, given that the 13 other boats fishing in that area were all about 10 feet from the reeds, and all of them were either twiddling or just plain puling (note the Wayners in the photos). A couple of boats had a big group of fish coralled into a corner of the butts and were giving them a tanking.
Meanwhile, we found the fish at the butts very difficult to tempt with dries. I did get a couple on a ginger crippled midge. But we were not doing as well as we should have been. We had a look elsewhere. Went up and round by Sandy Bay and the Heronry. Didn’t get the vibe there. Came back and looked in at Kate’s Brae – didn’t get the vibe there either. We eventually setlled at the reeds between Lochend and Bogle Knowe. Wee groups of fish would show for a minute then disappear. And again, they were tight to the reeds. I had an advantage, being a leftie on the left end, so nearest the reeds. Nothing we could do to square the boat up.
Jimmy tried a change to a suspender buzzer and that started wokring for him. I moved the ginger cripple to the dropper and put a top hat on the point. And straight away that worked. The rain was at its heaviest about this time and that kind of scunnered the rising fish. The buzzer hatch tailed-off as well, which didn’t help. We took a look back along at the butts, but nothing had changed, with a dose of boats strung out along the reed margin. We went back down to Lochend, but it was slow-going. We finshed with 10 to the boat.
A couple of good browns were caught, including one by Adrian Coats – see photo by Keith Logan.
