It’s getting warmer. Now the middle of May. It was 5.5 C at the start at Cobbinsahw last week. Up to 6.5 C yesterday. There was a NW breeze at the start, but it fell away to give a bright, calmish morning. It clouded over in the afternoon, which would have improved our dry fly fishing, except that the breeze got up, and turned first northerly… Brrrr! Then it went NE. Brrrrr!! Finally, it turned SE. Well, it’s Coldingham, so it has to be south-easterly, doesn’t it? Brrrrrrrrrr!! It was baltic by the end.
However, the temperature did not spoil the fishing. We had a good day. Mel Mitchell and I fished dries. It was Mel’s idea to start on them. And he had a fish first cast! He missed another shortly after. That was enough for me to put the dry fly rod up after about a dozen casts. And that was us for the rest of the day! We had plenty rising fish to target. They were concentrated up the top of the NW arm. The fuel consisted of hawthorn flies in the morning and olive duns in the afternoon. There was a smattering of beetles and black gnats. And buzzers… a trickle all day. They were the sooty olive and ginger ones, as the last few years. But this year they seem to have doubled in size. I measured them – the pupae were a full 20 mm!
For the hawthorns, we both used the pearly-winged heather fly pattern, which glints the sun off the wing, same as the naturals do. For the buzzers, I did well with a sooty olive and ginger paraloop hopper – tied for those particular buzzers. I was using a 14. I might have done better with a 10!
We both had some nice browns in our catches. The Club had 10 rods out and returned a total of 67 trout, 30 of which were brownies.
We had an eventful finale to our day. My fault for being complacent. I have 2 x 50 Ah lithium batteries, and have been used to getting a full day out of just one on smaller waters. I thought, it’s Coldingham – I’ll not need the 2 of them. So, I just charged up and took the one. At the very end of the day, we were away up the top of the arm, and we started for home. We got about 10 yards, when the battery management system decided the battery was too low to continue without risk of damage, and it shut it down. Erk! There are no oars in the boats these days. We drifted back up and into the middle of big lily bed. How do we get out of this??? Mel phoned the number on the seat, and Gareth came out in the rescue boat. Meanwhile, we had to try and get out of the lily bed, so he could reach us. Thankfully, there was a Canadian style paddle in the boat. Mel did a fine Hiawatha act to get us out the salad, just as Gareth arrived and threw us a line.
Lesson learned. I’ll take both batteries in future.
