Loch amazingly low – while everyone to the south had been suffering deluges… up here… nothing! Midges amazingly bad – a thing, apparently. Monday – we saw lots of fish – many fresh, despite the water levels. However, they were not for playing. Someone suggested they were put off by Storm Francis approaching.
Tuesday – Storm Francis arrived. It was meant to be 30 mph easterlies, but we had 3000+ feet of Ben Hope immediately east of us. This caused the wind to come round the ben from the north, and round it from the south and over the top and down on us from above… all at the same time! We had white horses at 90 degrees to to each other. We had cats’ paws with a new twist – a ‘shimmer’ effect, where the surface of the water skitters away down the wind with light scattering from it. We had the one where the surface of the water gets ripped off and thrown to the wind. And we had some spectacular water spouts! The attempts to fish were hopeless. We would set up for a drift, wind at our back. We would advance 10 yards, after which the wind would come in our faces, and push us back to the point we started. We tried hard for 2 hours and then gave up and went for a drive up to the north coast.
Wednesday started calm, but we got a breeze for most of the day, albeit a cool northerly… but after Tuesday it went down as ideal conditions. And we had a decent catch – 8 sea trout and 5 finnock, with the best two to Ron at around 4lb and around 3 lb. And we had most of them on the dap… which was fun.