Martyn White | Thursday, 11 January 2024
This week I had a few opportunities to work from home, luckily one of those days coincided with beautiful clear skies and sun. Unfortunately that was also the coldest day of the year so far, but I still walked up the river for my first fish of the year.
Now in winter there's no need to get up early to go try and catch carp on a fly, it's cold and the light is bad so I took my time over breakfast, checked my bag and left about 9.30. It was still around minus 2 celcius, but the sun was out and the frost was quickly melting. Even though it was sunny, the sun doesn't get particularly high in winter so it can be a bit tricky spotting fish. But moving nice and slow definitely helps you pick out those slow moving fins and tell tale ripples from the glare.As always when it's cold I start with a worm and look for fish on dark silt, and prefer to be looking at the north bank of the river which gets more sun and should heat up a bit quicker than other areas. As I expected with the weather being on a cooling the fish were mostly pretty negative, but I did find a few feeders. Unfortunately I spent quite a bit of time collecting refusals, even on what I was pretty sure were good presentations.
I changed flies several times with no success, before eventually just sticking on a glo-bug. The main reason for the choice is that they're very easy to see, even in dirty water at 30 or 40 feet. This can be a real help, especially when the fish are hard to see and not moving very dynamically to eat the fly. I still got a few refusals, but decided just to persevere with the glo-bug. Finally I found a couple of fish hanging in a shallow eddy under in a bridge, I could barely see them in the shade just vague shapes moving very slowly in the slack water. I dropped the fly in a foot or so in front of the fish let it settle on the bottom and waited as the fish gradually moved towards it. I lost sight of the fish but saw the globug move and disappear as one of them sucked it off the bottom. A short fight and a nice 4 pounder was my first fish of 2024. I followed this up with another couple of fish in much the same way-as well as a few more refusals- it seemed the fish were only willing to pick up a fly they'd "found" rather than eating a dropped or moved fly. This is another reason I like glo-bugs, especially in winter, I think neutral/non-feeding carp will pick them up as a reaction eat (possibly curiosity or sampling) rather than a true feeding response.