We arrived to find more of the sea haar we have been suffering in the past few weeks, what with easterly becoming the prevailing wind direction these days. It was patchy, and the sun was poking through to begin with. Before the outing, Mel produced a bottle of malt and a stack of glasses and we all joined in having a toast to the memory of Trevor. A nice touch, Mel.
I was teamed with Stewart Barnes, a member at the loch. Although it didn’t look hopeful for dries, Stewart said they had been working great, which was music to my ears. We started up the top of the NW arm, with a light northerly breeze, though not desperately cold. I had put on a pair of size 12 hogs, so that I could give them some movement if they didn’t work as static dries. I had picked a cowdung one (top left) and an alder one, in hope of falls of either. I cast them out on the water and a fish lollipopped the cowdung one first cast. A good start. Stewart was not long in getting his first fish, to a sparkle gnat.
We both landed a second fish and thought, ‘here we go!’ However, after the initial success, we had an extended period of fresh-air shots to our dries. Memories started to come back to me of the outing a couple of years ago when I counted missed offers to the dries and ended the day with 5 fish from 75 chances. I came off the hogs to something smaller, less bushy and less buoyant. Firstly, I tried a black half-hog and a 14 black ethafoam beetle/terrestrial. These continued to get the ‘fresh-air’ offers. A further switch, this time to a 14 black crippled midge (a black one of these) and a pearly-winged black bits. resulted in making inroads, and the conversions to misses ratio improved. Stewart was matching me, fish for fish as well. .
We had done a couple of full length drifts of the loch, and that had started to home us in on there being a dose of rising fish in the NW corner, in front of the reed beds. We were by now seeing the reason for the rises. Hawthorn flies. Big ones. Some very big ones among them – or so I thought at this stage. There were alders too. With such substantial meat on the water, I couldn’t see why all the arsy takes to size 14s. Never mind, we were now making hay… (Incidentally, while up at the reed beds, I was hearing a bird in among them – saw it flitting about as well. I put Merlin bird ID app on it. It was a reed warbler.)
The middle section of the day gave us our best period, and we moved the scoreboard on a fair bit, for a couple of hours or so. Some fish were coming ‘out the blue’, but the essence of fishing dries for me is to see a rise, and to put the fly in front of it, right line and right distance… and then to watch it take the fly confidently. A good proportion of the fish were in the latter camp… which is nice.
The weather was continuing to do weird things. Bouts of haar were coming and going, interspersed with bright sunshine. The temperature was going up and down with it. Layers had to be peeled off, only to be put back on, a bit later…
We got our boat total up past the 20 mark by mid-afternoon, but at that point the haar moved it up a gear and a pea-souper descended on the loch. We couldn’t see 10 yards! The temperature plummeted with it, the supply of flies dried-up, and the fish stopped rising. We tried drifting back down the loch. Stewart came off the dries and went over to a washing line. I tried going back to a pair of hogs, so I could figure-of-eight them. Stewart added 2 more with the washing line, and I added one to the hogs. We finished with 25 to the boat.
We had some nice brownies in our catch. Quite a few of the rainbows were passing the 3 lb mark and the fight in some of the rainbows was quite extraordinary. My Maxcatch 5-weight floater is 100 ft long, so it takes a good run to get the backing knot off the reel. However, I had at least 15 yards of backing out, 2 or 3 times.
In the course of things, I hooked one rainbow in the rakers, and it bled out on me, trying to revive it. I could see it was a goner – its gills stopped completely, so I knocked it on the head. When gutting it last night, I kept its stomach contents and took a photo. It turns out, the ‘monster hawthorns’ were some kind of cuckoo bee, we think. It also transpires that small beetles and smallish gnats were making up a more substantial part of its diet than the hawthorns and alders. Trout love beetles – and it is so often hard to see them in the water when you are trying to work out what they are feeding on. I wondered whether the small beetles played a part in the period of arsy takes??? There was an olive nymph in there as well… and a couple of those water mites that are still alive, when you take the photo 24 hours later.
