Martyn White | Thursday, 25 August 2022
It's been an mixed week. I've been doing a good bit of fishing and tying. Some of the fishing was unexpectedly good, some was disappointing and the tying was a bit rushed
On Monday the forecast was bad so I just walked down the river by me rather than making a long journey. The light was pretty bad initially, but by lunchtime the clouds had lifted and thinned to a high overcast, still not the best but at least it was fairly even. I actually prefer that to the constant switch between visibility and obscurity that comes with bright sun and passing clouds, I find that my eyes get used to the even light and spotting fish isn't that hard. I managed a few hours fishing before the weather turned again and lightning drove me home. But it was a great few hours! 16 carp including one of 8.5lb and another of just over 9lb, not huge for carp but big for where I was fishing and 8-9 pounders are lovely to catch. It was nice to hook something that I actually had to net rather than just using the top eye to poke the fly out.
Tuesday, the weather was much better so I went a bit further afield to hit a river that, because of construction work, I've not been fishing so much over recent years. The bass fishing has been pretty much ruined there, but there are still plenty of carp some of them very big and most of them predatory. Unfortunately, I barely saw a fish for the first half mile. Further down I started to see a few fish, but they seemed pre-spooked and wouldn't eat. It was a bit confusing until I spotted some large groups of river swimmers, pretty surprising on a weekday after the schools have gone back, but there you go: people out making the most of the last weeks of summer. The worst thing though was finding that 2 good mulberry trees that used to overhang the river have been cut down. That's going to impact the fishing there and it meant I couldn't take any cuttings to propagate.
The rest of my free time has been spent getting ready to head to Shizuoka this weekend to fish a large lagoon for black snapper or bream (depending where you're from). Okinawa isn't happening this summer for various reasons- mostly connected to me not being organised. So I'm finally heading down to Hamanako to have a go. I had to tie up some little shrimpy things, just a single pattern but in several weights and some with weedguards. Then my friend who lives down there said I better bring mullet flies as the big ones are there in numbers at the moment so I had to get back to the vice again just when I thought I was ready. The forecast is'nt great, but hopefully we'll get some good fishing nonetheless.