Like A Virgin

Instead of spending a long time searching for pods of fish, I took John to the poole below a dam upstream of wehere I'd found maruta last week. These are usually pretty high percentage areas on this river as the fish seem to stack up right under the dam's outflow rather than finding the fish ladders built on either side. When this happens the maruta can behave a bit like grayling that pod up together and become quite tolerant of anglers wading nearby. Ideal for someone who's just starting out and still getting to grips with casting. John brought a spinning rod as well as his fly rod, just in case. Fortunately we were able to avoid that and kept him on the fly.

We arrived justas the lightwas coming up and made our way to large gravel bar in the middle of the river and dropped off our bags and I got john to show me how successful his casting practice had been. It didn't take long to identify the first major obstacle to his progress; threading his line through the hook keeper before the guides! John reckons it's not that obvious that you shouldn't, and I know that we often take certain knowledge for granted when we've been doing something for decades, but I wouldn't have thought that was something you'd need to tell anyone, especially when they know hoe to rig a spinning rod...

Anyway, over the next hour or so, we ironed out a few little wrinkles with timing and stopping his stroke and he was able to fairly consistently make a 20ft presentation with varying degrees of accuracy. So we just had to find some fish and try to get close enough for him to get one. There were a few fish head and tailing in a bigger pool, and some carp mooching arounnd behind them, so I put a spawn pattern on John's leader and he had a go at the carp, but spooked them pretty quickly. We decided to walk along the sluice to see what we could find, mostly carp that didn't play ball. But as the sun got a bit higher and the temperature got up we found some maruta, not a tonne but a couple of decent shoals. John switched to a butano perdigon and quickly hooked up and got broken off on when the maruta ran round a bit of riprap. Still he'd hooked one on his own, so we retied and I added a bit of fl. red amnesia to his butt section so he'd be able to see where things were a bit better. Basically I like old fashioned Czech nymphing for maruta, like from the 90s, before the advent of the mono rig, So I was trying to get John to do that where possible as it doesn't require much in the way of casting or line management and it's relatively easy to identify an eat. Unfortunately John couldn't seem to pick out the eats or react in time so I stuck an indicator on and we carried of to where I could see more fish trying to run the sluice but having to stop at the wall. They there in numbers just milling around, dropping back and hanging betweeen the tongues of current, feeding on whatever got washed down to them. John was going to have to make a slightly longer cast, with an indicator on and manage his drift, but we took a bit of time to get into as easy a position as possible for him and it didn't take him long to get a cast in the right spot. The indicator had only drifted maybe 5 feet before it shot under and started moving upstream. Luckily for John the reistance of the thingamabobber was enough to pull the hook home and he was connected to a nice maruta around 3lb which put up a good account of itself out in the open river before I eventually tailed it for him. A few photos and it was handshakes and smiles. His first fly caught fish, and it was a beautiful maruta.

I basically played guide for much of the rest of the day, helping John put a few more fish in the net and just taking my shot whenever John was dealing with tangles or other minor problems that didn't need me to fix, we even managed to double up when he hooked a fish on a n errant cast that let me make a cast in close while he was playing his fish out in the main pool. All in all, it was good day and I'm glad we have the maruta available because theyre a great training fish in the right situation. Usually I don't spend a full day on them because they can be so easy that it stops being fun, but for a beginner the challenge is still there and they're an ideal way to build a bit of confidence and get some positive results. His next species will probably be carp, but that will be much more challenging and will need a good bit of casting practise beforehand.