Martyn White | Thursday, 22 May 2025
This week I couldn't take being stuck at home anymore, so I went fishing. Actually I was planning to stay home and continue my recovery/tidy the tying room. Then I saw a picture of some ripe Tokyo mulberries and there was no way I was missing the chance of that fishing. I'm not sure it was actually a great idea given how done in I was afterwards, but I don't regret it.
Mulberry time is basically the equivalent of duffers' fortnight for carp. Once the fish really get on them they get reckless and it's great fun catching them on top. So much fun in fact, that over the years I've taken cuttings from bushes and propagated them along my local river. Thy didn't all take but enough did and there are now some nicely established trees and bushes along the few miles I fish. At the moment there are still plenty of white/green berries on the bushes with maybe only a quarter fully ripe. Enough have fallen in that the fish are starting to gather under the branches, but we're not yet at the peak. Even though it's still early, the fish were definitely on and as I'm basically the only person who fishes this stretch of river they've had several weeks of respite so were much less difficult than normal. It took me about 13 seconds to catch my first fish and had a good dozen in the first hour. The key is to walk the fish away from the tree once you hook it. I usually try to go a good 10m or more upstream, play and land it before going back to the bush and witing for the fish to settle. This means you can usually catch several fish from each bush before they switch off completely. Later I managed seven from one bush, and actually had an 8th eat the fly but I miss timed the hook set and spooked the fish which spooked the rest of them. They become weirdly tolerant of a lot of things, and don't mind multiple presentations and even a bad shot, but a missed eat seems to be where they draw the line.
Something I did notice was that the stem placement on my fly seemed to make a bit of a difference to the hooking. I like the bright green foam stem because it helps me to pick out the fly when it's in the shade more than for any realism. I used to always put the foam over the hook eye, but it's very easy to break it off. So the last batch I tied I put the foam off the back which did make the stem last longer, but also made the fly harder to see and seemed to make the fly a less effective hooker. I suspect the foam might be stiff enough to push the fly away from the fish's mouth and/or the foam out the back causing the bend end to resist sucking under meaning the fly is turned inside the mouth impeding the hookset. I've still got a few tied that way but I'll be topping up with the front end foam for more experimenting on that this week. I shouldn't complain really as I had about 3 dozen fish in a few hours, but, if Ihad been on one of the other rivers with fewer and larger fish it could have been more of an issue. Fewer fish, fewer shots, missed eats are more significant.
I've forced John to get glasses and he's coming over on Monday to get a go on the mulberry feeders which is good and will give him a chance to get to grips with some dry fly fishing on a relatively sedate water where line management isn't so challenging.