A big improvement in the weather of recent weeks. It was maybe a bit bright for the fishing, but it was very welcome to be out on a calm, sunny, spring-like day.
Dougie Skedd and I started off on dries. We had decent early cloud cover and a sparse number of buzzers, but there was not much rising. After a decent try we had one missed offer to Dougie, OTB, and that was it. We tried other tactics. Dougie re-rigged his dries rod for straight-lining buzzers, while I put up a second rod with a washing line (on nylon) on a 5 ft tip. This resulted in even less interest than our dries.
It was getting properly bright now and we were not seeing much in the way of risers. Dougie put up a second rod and opted to sell his soul for a DI-5 and a pair of big boobies, a black and a Santa’s beard. This immediately paid dividends and he started to catch fish. We were drifting up the south east arm on a light north-westerly by now, and there was a definite group of fish between the shore and the island. I acquiesced slightly, switching from nylon to fluoro and adding a beaded tadpole to the tail, plus a cormorant and a hare’s ear snatcher on the top dropper. A twitchy retrieve to put a bit of sink and draw into the tadpole started to have some success. However, the 2 fish I converted with it were both on the cormorant. It was a distant second-best to the DI-5 and boobies though, which accounted for 7 by the time they put their tin helmets on and ran for cover.
We went back towards the home bay shoreline, where we picked up one more each – mine on the cormorant again. It all seemed a bit quiet though and, for want of where else to try, we decided to go back to where we had been catching. We were getting a bit of cloud now, and a few more buzzers were in the air. There were one or two sepia duns as well, and we were seeing a few rises. As I still had the dries on the other rod, I picked it up and my ghillie attempted to get me a throw at a riser. I got a cover on one that was a bit of an awkward angle. It took my crippled midge nicely and I lifted. I had a bit too much adrenaline worked-up by now, while for its part the fish bolted away when it felt the hook. The two opposing forces and the awkward angle all came together to result in a PING! A few bad words were said. All that effort to get the hard bit right, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Not to mention it cost me a fly, and I had to break-in a new dry leader.
The risers faded away, so we took another look at the west shoreline. Now we were seeing a decent number of rises. I had rerigged with the same as I was on when I got broken – a shuttlecock on the dropper and a hare’s ear crippled midge on the tail, both 14s. Pretty much the first chance I got at a cover, the fish took and I controlled myself this time. By now Dougie was putting up dries. We then had a hectic spell when we were covering rises and getting them to take our dries no bother. Dougie landed 2 and I landed a further 3 – two of them in consecutive casts. Nothing coming out the blue at all – every fish was from a cover.
It would have been quite something if we had been able to keep that spell going, but we scunnered the group we were in amongst and when we drifted on down and into another wee area with a few risers in it, those ones were the total opposite and we couldn’t interest them at all. That was lousing time. Not a bad day, with 17 to the boat.
