Martyn White | Thursday, 21 March 2024
This week has been more maruta fishing in Tokyo. Hiromiki joined me on the river one of the days, the first time we've managed to fish together since Okinawa last summer so it was good to catch up and put some potential summer plans together.
I was pretty surprised to learn that despite being Japanese living in Tokyo, Hiromiki had never fished for maruta. When I asked him why he said it was because they arrive at the start of the trout season and he and his other fishing mates always go to the trout rivers. I don't really get chosing low quality stock fish (I rarely see nice stockies in Japan) that will be available all year over a wild anadromous fish that's probably fin perfect and definitely harder fighting than a tailless lump of rainbow.
Miki likes a 2 hander and fishing on the swing usually, but I talked him into bringing a 6wt single hander because he'd have the best chances if fishing nymphs and the short rod can still be put to use for swinging. I gave him a handfull of perdigons, worms and other little bugs and we got started. There were many more fish in the river this week and it took us all of 5 minutes to find fish hanging below a riffle getting ready to push up to the next pool and Hiromiki hooked up after a couple of casts, but lost the fish as it bombed down the pool. I don't think he expected the fish to be as strong as it was, the place we were fishing is only about 10km from the sea and this one was obviously very fresh and powerful. Luckily, it only took him ten minutes to hook up with another fish that he did land; another first on the Tama river. We spent the next few hours working upstream till we hit the weir, both of us catching plenty of maruta.
We spent maybe another half hour catching maruta and carp in the weir pool, both of us connecting with and losing some real tanks of carp as the light leaders got rubbed through on the rip-rap and concrete current breakers at the bottom of the weir. By lunch time we'd both had enough after the early start so went to get lunch and a pint before heading home. I've had enough maruta for the year, they're pretty fish but the fishing is too easy to stay interesting. I'll be back for the with heavier gear for targeting those big carp and barbel for the rest of the maruta run.