It's good to sit down

There had been quite a bit of rain towards the end of last week, but by Monday I was expecting my local river to be in good order so headed over and made my way a few kilomentres upstream with the intention of fishing my way back down. It was more difficult than I thought, there were tailing fish on every shallow flat and plenty of active fish visible in deeper areas. But I stuck to my plan and trudged on by. When I decided to start fishing I dropped down to the river and spooked a couple of fish hanging tight to my bank. I always start on the right bank in this stretch as the left is lined with small trees and bushes that hang over the stream, usually holding carp that are looking for whatever falls in. Unfortunately they'd been cut back recently, but there were still a few fish hanging round looking reasonably active. So I sat down to wait for things to settle, tied a new leader, got rigged up and tied on a little unweighted woolly worm. I stuck a worm and a backstabber on my hat so I'd have a couple of quick changes depending on what was in front of me as I made my way downstream. Once I started I picked up a quick half dozen fish in the first 50m. It's quite a small stream so I actually spent more time sitting down in the long grass waiting for things to calm down between releases than actively fishing. The sitting is definitley still fishing, but it's certainly not active.

Moving downstream I had to switch to a weighted pattern as the river shallows and got faster. Actually it was still running a bit high which made it tricky to get a fly in front of a feeding fish and then have it stay in the zone long enough to get eaten. I spooked a fair few while I was trying to get a good handle on just how far ahead of the fish I was having to execute the drop part of the drag & drop presentation and honestly, the cross stream presentations over about 20ft had a lower success rate than I'd have liked, far lower. The most frustrating thing was that I could tell that plenty were good because the carp were trying to eat the fly but I couldn't mend enough or keep enough line off the water to stop it getting dragged away just too quickly for them to get a hold of it. But with the flow being a bit heavier there were a lot more fish hugging the banks and they were very catchable, swings and roundabouts I suppose. Keeping low and quiet let me get nice and close and I got some excellent visual eats on the backstabber dropping the fly and giving it a short pull to simulate escape had the fish darting forward and sucking it in. If I could get close enough to make a leader only cast the eat seemed guaranteed.

Further downstream the river widens out considerably and there are more really skinny flats with slow flows, and they were full of aggressively tailing fish. There were still plenty on my bank to catch, and much as I started the day I spent a lot of time sitting waiting. If there was a fish on my bank that I could see, I'd catch it and then wait untill the tailers started going at it again. The hardest part was waiting till they were really confident before putting a shot in! I had a few refusals and lost a few flies to the bottom but when I got the fly in front of happy fish they were aggressively chasing the fly down and there was no question about the eat. It's often the case that the fish on these flats are like this when they're on the feed because they're in those areas looking for long arm shrimp and crayfish so are willing to make the effort.

None of the fish were huge, probably averaging 3-5lb with one surprisingly thick fatty getting weighed at 8lb 3oz, but by the time I was done, I'd caught about 30, which was plenty. An ideal outing to reset the demons after a few weeks without getting on the water. I enjoyed it so much I went back out today after an early finish at work and squeezed in a couple of hours doing much the same except without the frustrating high flows. It's really hard to beat late spring fishing for wild, river carp!