Dougie Skedd reports…
Oh dear! Blast! Oh bollocks! Bu**er! … and other oaths and imprecations were heard loudly from our boat at Harelaw reservoir on Saturday. Keith Logan and I were having a bit if a shocker. The trout were giving us the run around. We had both started with dries. Everyone I’ve spoken to about Harelaw tells me it’s a great dry fly water, so we went with the flow. I had a size twelve hawthorn pattern on the dropper and a size sixteen shuttlecock on the point. Keith had started with a couple of size fourteen CDCs. We drifted from the south shore, out between the islands. All good? Well, not quite. There’s a phenomenon known as the “fresh air shot”. A trout comes up and over your dry fly and looks like an absolute goner. Thing is, when you lift there’s no contact whatsoever. I have no idea what happens, other than there’s no fish. Well, Keith and I were having a real dose of them, hence the bad language.
We took a second run through the islands, since there were obviously plenty of fish there. We both picked up a fish there, an absolute belter to Keith and a less inspiring specimen to me. We carried on and the fresh air shots continued, but some fish came into the boat too. I was getting all my action to the tiny shuttlecock. I changed the dropper through a series of different footprints, to see if anything clicked. It didn’t. Eventually, I put a size sixteen pale-coloured sedge on the dropper. I didn’t really expect a fish to eat it, but it would act as a sighter to enable me to see where my flies were against dark water. It certainly did what it was intended to do, but it also picked up two fish that just slammed into it – unlike the fish to the wee point fly, which were just nipping at the fly. OK, I confess. The two that slammed the sedge did so when I wasn’t looking. Not like me at all.
Keith was chopping and changing quite a bit. He had fish on his dries, he had a couple of fish on a washing line rig, and late on he had two on a double decker. Twice we had a double with both of us playing a fish at the same time, so obviously we were drifting through wee packs of fish. We picked away steadily and finished with fourteen to the boat. We had a really enjoyable day. Good sport and lots of tall tales. Pity about the fresh sir shots. though. I wonder if Keith’s blood pressure is back down to normal yet?