Paul Arden | Sunday, 14 August 2022
James and Tracy are competing at the World Championships in Norway and will send in their report soon. I’ve had patchy Internet and so haven’t been able to follow the Championships closely – but from what I’ve seen I think Bernt has done well!! – and so I look forward to reading the full report soon.
I’m driving down the lake in a squall. It always amazes me how quickly these lakes blow up from mirror calm to white caps. Basically quicker than the time it took me to write my first sentence!! And it’s something I always have to take into consideration when mooring the battleship to a stump, quite often the stumps break free. Ok… now I’m surfing the waves!
I thought I would write something today about boat positioning tactics, predominately for Snakehead with babies but much also applies to taking shots at any moving predatory fish.
There are a number of factors that need to be taken into account. The first really is that you want to be able to sight the fish and not only see the rise. Which means you need to be able to see into the water. This mostly comes down to surface reflection. If the reflection is sky and particularly clouds then you are not going to see the fish. If the reflection is jungle bank-side then you can see in. So that has a large bearing on boat positioning.
Another factor is the angle the Snakehead is surfacing. Usually they look away from the sun and more often than not they rise in the shade of the babies. This is very important information because when throwing pulling flies at fish you want to tease the fly away from the fish and preferably at 30-60 degree angle away from their direction. (Zero and 90 degrees also work but 90 degrees often means that the fish will change direction before the eat and straight down the line is always more difficult to set the hook). Pulling the fly towards the fish results in a spook of course.
The third consideration is their possible swimming course. I generally allow them a possible 45 degree change of swimming direction, both left and right, between rises. This means that there might be a couple of possible rising locations and you need to hedge your bets and not put all your money on only one.
The final consideration is that you don’t want to be to where the fish are swimming. You need to get in fast for the quick shot. But if the adult/s doesn’t/don’t rise on the next occasion you don’t want to find yourself in a position where they will then see you or swim into the boat.
That’s basically it. Studying the fish to see the direction they are rising respective to the babies, figuring out where they are going and hedging your bets, being in the right position to make a shot that pulls the fly away from the fish (preferably at 30-60 degrees), and being stealthily positioned such that they remain unaware of you.
Once you have starting putting in the shots consistently, with me positioning the boat, then it’s time to try making the shot happen on your own!
Cheers,Paul
Today’s PoD. That’s Lamb filming the shot in his beach shorts while Justin directs it :) Thanks Adam for the action photo!