Martyn White | Thursday, 2 May 2024
With Japan being in the middle of the golden week holidays, I wasn't expecting to do any fishing this week. On Monday though I was at a bit of a loose end after some early morning jobs and conditions were so good I decided to go and risk the crowds.
I decided just to walk over to my local place rather than traveling any kind of distance, just in case. When I got to the lake there were loads of people around, some fishing and some just dicking about, but surprisingly I didn't have to trek far upstream to leave them behind. The last people I saw fishing were only a mile from the lake at most. I had one other encounter with a guy who decided to come and start strimming the bank feet away from me while I was playing a fish, which was weird.
I'd decided to push further up the river than normal and explore some new water. On the way I stopped to check on a mulberry bush to see how the fruit hatch was developing. There was a chunky carp sitting right on the bank, back out of the water feeding pretty hard among the detritus. A cast with a drag and drop was impossible so I had to crawl in close and dap my little backstabber in front of it. The carp ate so aggressively that it hooked itself and charged off upstream. After a good fight - partially accompanied buy the thrum of the strimmer- I slipped the net under 15lb of fin perfect, wild, river common. A great start, but I decided to put a bit more distance between myself and the "gardener".
I headed another few miles upstream, passing the weir pool that usually marks my upper limit. What I found was pretty disappointing; narrow, but canalised and deeper than the natural river below the weir, slow flowing and muddy, but more importantly seemingly devoid of fish. I vaguely remember a fish kill about a decade ago, so maybe everything above the weir was eradicated. With no fish pass it's unlikely to get repopulated. Still it's good to have checked it out.
Back to the weir pool, and it was full of fish. The deeper water immediately under the weir was well populated with trailers, but it was impossible to get the backstabber down to them. I moved a bit down to tail of the pool and put the fly in front of a couple of carp, but got no response. They didn't spook or change behavior in any way, so I changed to a worm fly with tungsten dumbbells and switched angles in the hope of letting the fly sit a bit longer in front of the fish. Immediate success as the lead fish charged and inhaled the fly, we were only briefly connected before the fish came unstuck. The others were still feeding pretty hard and I could have probably put a shot in but I decided to sit down and wait a bit to let them fully settle. I repeated the same thing couple of times, but landed the next 2 fish both nice and clean and around 5lb. After that the pool was blown and I had to head downstream.
Moving away from the weir, I had to take the tungsten off. There were some fish clooping under bushes so I stuck on a woolly worm, caught a couple and moved on. The shallow water had plenty of active tailing fish so I switched over to the backstabber again and picked fish off as I worked my way downstream. A nice mix of longer casts with drag & drop presentations and tight tricky close fish right under the rod tip made for excellent sport. I rounded things off with a second double figure fish at just over 11lb. My backstabber started the day pretty sparse, but probably needs retiring now.
So, I ended up having a fantastic day of fishing on a day I wasn't even going to go. I didn't even have to walk that far to escape the crowds. Even though I caught fewer fish than my last outing, I fished better and the way I caught them was better. All in all , not bad for a Monday!