"Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing."
---Ben Hogan

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I am a fly fisherman, of course. And like every other fly fisherman, I have a huge imagination. Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve known about enormous fish monsters living in the bottomless depths of lakes and rivers. And growing into an older boy hasn’t caused this imagination to diminish in the slightest; big fish ARE out there!

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My rides up the dirt road put me in 10-11 minutes of Zone 2 (heart rate for an older person) and then 20-30 minutes in Zone 3 with an occasional bit in Zone 4. Steve decided to start building a mountain bike trail on our property by connecting and clearing deer highways. With enough switchbacks and perimeter trail, it can be close to a mile in length, with a good quarter mile uphill that quickly puts my heartrate into Zone 3 with the remaining part downhill or flat. I’ve yet to ride it because Steve crashed hard on his first attempt, finding hidden “features” beneath the duff. My self-appointed job it to pick up all the dead branches and small trees along the trail to beautify it and reduce fuels. That deadwood is hauled to the dump to be chipped. It’s a lot of work but gratifying.

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There was no fishing this week, a typhoon was hitting western Japan and we were getting strong winds and inches of rain.

A pity because I'd arranged to take Canadian John out for some carp using float and fly - I'm gradually moving him towards the fly rod, but need to overcome the resistance/fear. Just in case he didn't get on with artificials, he'd gone to the petshop and got a box of live crickets, which was weirdly nostalgic for me, but more about that later. Unfortunately we had to postpone, hopefully he can keep the crickets alive until next week. I took advantage of the weather and started restocking my severely neglected carp box, well one of them anyway. Dries & slow sinkers.

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The morning of day three we woke to another still, icy morning, in for another blue sky day. We packed down camp and started to plan the day out, we made the decision to walk around one of the main lakes, thinking it would be the fastest route. It started out well, easy walking for the first couple kilometers because the lake was so low. As we made our way further up the lake we started to run into cliffs and thick pencil pine forests. I still don’t know why we didn’t think to make another plan, because it was like this the whole day, up and down cliffs and the occasional swim.

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Tomorrow, as I write, James and I will be running another BFCC meeting. This one is in Kent, so James is driving now after picking me up from Bristol where I was working all week. We'll be doing a lot of travelling over this weekend – both taking turns to drive. We’ve just stopped at a very busy Sportfish Theale and watched trout leap for damsels and saw emerging mayflies. This almost made us break out the rods and start fishing! We're currently stuck in busy traffic on the M25 but we're hoping to get to Kent to do some casting practice, mainly me as I haven't cast a rod for over a week.

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