Fishing The Front

The forecast for Monday was looking pretty good, warm, good cloud cover with a couple of mm of rain and light winds of 1-3 m/s all day. Chuck and I decided to head out on the float tubes in search of largemouth. It meant a fairly early rise, but nothing too crazy since we were expecting no direct sunshine. When we arrived around 6.30 it was pretty clear that the forecast had been less than accurate. It wasn't windy but the rain was torrential and a quick check of the weather apps had us somewhere between 11 and 13mm an hour for the next couple of hours before slackening off. We decided to wait in the car for a bit and see what happened. After a hour the forecast had changed again with the heavy rain set to continue and the wind to increase.  A tough decision had to be made, and we decided to get set up and start fishing. Conditions were horrible but I'm glad we did.  We were immediately in to fish, racking up several bass, carp catfish and some species of silver fish on popper dropper rigs. The Weather continued to deteriorate and winds increased till we were struggling to hold position in the float tubes as the whitecaps started to appear. Normally we'd have had to chuc it and go home but the place we fish has a serries of sluices and gates that are used for managing water supply to nearby paddy fields and to prevent flooding which had been opened creating enough flow in the opposite direction to the wind that we could just manage to keep fishing.  The worse it got the bettter the fishing was, I had one bass  try to eat my popper, miss it, eat again on the next cast  which I failled to hook up, then eat the dropper bug before I could recast.  Then when the front passed over the fishing basically died, the clouds gradually lifted and we weere forced to call it a day.  eBfore this I'd often heard of and experienced good pre-front basss fishing, but had really only associated it with the hours BEFORE the front passes over, you know "pre". I think both of us are now looking forward to the next time we get asemi fishable looking bit of weather to go out in and see if fishing the bleeding edge of the front continues to pay off as well as it did.

The following day I was workign from home and had no meetings or anything time dependant so went a walk up the river in the morning. I was expecting a dirty river but it wasn't so bad having dropped and cleared fairly reasonably overnight.  What I didn't expect was to see the mulberries starting to ripen and fall in the river. I usually associate that with mid June around here. Of course my neglect of the carp box meant I only had one beat up mulberry pattern with me. Luckily that didn't matter because the fish were starting to condition themselves to the plop of of the berries and, crucially I haven't fished for them enough to make them wary of eating everything that falls in. I caught one fish quickly on a glo-bug, quite far from any bush, but it was clearly turned on by the plopping of the fly, rushing to the splash but not finding the fly. Another cast a bit close and it ate aggressively, clearly trying to make sure none of the other fish nearby beat it to the "meal". I had a couple of refusals nearer to the bushes so stuck on a black woolly worm and quickly picked up another couple before heading downstream to the next bush. Years ago I took cuttings from the existing mulberries and planted them along the river to increase the number of berries falling in during the summer. They didn't all make it, but several did and the river now has a berry bush every 1-200 yards. It's ideal really, more food for the fish, birds, creatures and me as well as more of the excellent berry hatch in the summer.

I stopped to change flies and have a shot a nice feeding fish, but didn't catch it. It did the thing I'm sure many carp anglers have seen of half trying to eat, the mouth extending and the fish movign forward as though it wants the fly, but not fully commiting to making the effort of moving forward to completely eat. Another, closer presentation got a more positive response, but I was too quick on the hookset after the berry eaters. When I came to the next bush I put the woolly worm back on and hooked up immediately. Unfortunately the bankside vegetation and steepness meant netting it was going to be a nightmare so I went for a rod poke release. It's something I've done a million times without issue, until this time. Just as I was about to poke the fly free, the fish closed its mouth and turned away, snapping the top inch off my rod. Which meant I had to try to scramble down the bank to complete the world's clumsiest net job while lying on my belly and trying not to slide into the water! The fish was safely released and the rod is packed up and ready to send for repair, I just need to buy a longer handled landing net now...