I feel a bit like I’m living in a mental haze at the moment. Certainly my brain is foggy when I wake up in the mornings. I think this is because I’m training hard and the body is constantly recovering. It’s not because I’m drinking booze, because there is very little of that!

But I am actually living in a literal haze too. Indonesia burns off at this time of year. There are thousands of fires, most started intentionally. The haze was so bad last Friday that they closed the schools here in Malaysia because the air quality was deemed so unsafe.

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Paul wrote yesterday about living in a haze. Smoke from Indonesia, thick enough that he got lost on a lake he has lived on for ten years.

Mine is the other kind. This week has been an onslaught of problems, one after another, none of them to do with fish. You can’t see the hills in that either.

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It's a busy time for the BFCC team as after the Essex casting day, we had a weekend with the GAIA team in Derbyshire, and we're now preparing to go to France for a fly fishing show with casting competitions. Personally, this is bitter-sweet as I can't cast as much as I would normally do due to the lump on my right hand. At Brentwood, I only cast the light gear and double handed outfits, so it was the first time in many years that I didn't complete all seven events.

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As I've been on a bonefish kick recently I thought it would make sense to do the fly that we owe most of the others to: the Nasty Charlie.

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My nephews came to Kuusamo for fishing trip.  They are truly hooked now. I didn't have possibility to fish with them. Yet I have to admire that they did few days in around zero celsius. We had also first snow, so conditions were not best possible, even if sun was shining now and then. I got news that they caught few graylings and saw photo about extremely high water in one river, never seen that before on this time of year.

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We found some last Sunday and Monday. The weather was still pretty lousy -  an overcast of widely varying density, painted glare in inconvenient places - embedded cells dumped rain. We got soaked a few times. The wind was up and down and it was tough to find clean water. So it was all about finding shallows that would show pushes, backs and tails. All this was made more difficult by a tide cycle without minus tides and less than a one foot swing. There were no visible fish in their usual places. We usually use the boat ramp at the Delta Marina in Buras which provides uquick access to some quiet, lonely fishing when the flood control gates are open. Delta Marina is on a channel, connected through a massive gate to the bays and marshes to the west and reaching toward a levee to the east. The Mississippi runs on the other side of the levee. Big tankers and even cruise ships sail up and down the river looking a little taller than they should be. The channel serves big working craft, shimpers, and pogie netters. None can get out to the open water unless Jimmy Floodgates says so. He has a magic number (I’m remembering +0.61 feet) above which he keeps the gate shut. We were shut in till 10 am over the weekend but usually they’re open all day.

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