NEW YEAR

NEW YEAR

Viking Lars | Saturday, 31 December 2022

Happy New Year to all of you loyal readers of the Sexyloops front pages. I enjoy reading the frontpages, which always are very diverse. Casting, fly tying, fishing, jungle craft, irrelevant ramblings, thoughts, inspiration and much, much more. I look forward to another year of a weekly, semi-panic-state-of-mind, when Paul either Friday evening or Saturday morning reminds that it’s that time of the week. Today he wrote 20 minutes ago, so I blame him for being late today. It’s incredible that I can still forget after two decades of doing this. I'll take another handful of years, I think.

I’m on kitchen duty all day, so there’ll be no fishing for me today. I was hoping for a bike ride, but time ran. I did tie a few flies this morning before the family got up. It’s very mild today, no wind, 7-8-9 degrees and I ought to be out looking for a sea trout. But it’s fine - a day in the kitchen preparing a good meal for the family is well spent.

And I did spend a day on the water fishing pike this Thursday. Where the weather wasn’t as good, in fact it was quite bad. Windy and lots of rain, but still not cold, so a great day out. And we both caught a handful of pike. With the water at 1-2 degrees they were actually very active - we were constantly seeing small roach being chased to the surface. The lake was partially ice covered and we even saw a pike breaking the ice as it chased a mouthful of roach just under the ice.

Unfortunately it was the best part of the lake that was ice covered. Fortunately it wasn’t thicker than we could push the float tubes through it, so we carved out huge flakes of ice and let the wind push them out, into the lake. What’s surprising is that five minutes later, we caught pike just under the new edge of the ice. When you don’t hit ice-out, just create it yourself.

I had one pike take in usual pike manner with bad intentions not to be misunderstood, but the rest were  very subtle takes. I think I missed maybe 15 or 20 takes and caught 5.

A great day out and a perfect ending to a fishing year. Tomorrow another begins, but I’ll start with a bike ride. If the weather continues to be mild, I’ll get in the salt to chase up a sea trout or two.

Have a great weekend - and a great 2023!

On behalf of everyone,
Lars