Rational

Rational

Martyn White | Thursday, 29 February 2024

Our crazy weather patterns have been continuing since last week. In the 7 days since I wrote my last FP we've had 3 twenty degree temperature swings! Not only that, the forecast for my day off had changed pretty drastically from Thursday to Sunday. Given the previous week's fishing, I decided to stay home and make sure I had my flies ready for the maruta run. As much as I would have liked to get out, I'm glad I put the time aside for tying, as I saw the first reports of the runs yesterday. A bit further south and west, so they might be turning up here by the end of the week.

So I have everything ready to go, the bag is packed and the weather seems to be a bit more stable. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I'm heading down to the lower river Tama to see what's happening. I'm not taking the 10'#3 though, I'll go with the #6 & #8 until they show up in numbers. That means I can always turn to carp, barbel or bass if I can't find the Maruta. Once they really start stacking up, We'll get JOhn out for his first fish on fly. It's a great chance for him because there's nothing particularly technical about the casting or the fishing so we should be able to properly cement the addiction.

Aside from that, Chuck and I have been scioping out some of the places we used to go float-tubing. They'd basically been washed out by typhoon Hagibis a few years ago and really hadn't been worth fishing. But last autumn he went back for a look and said it looked to be recovering and he even caught a couple of fish. Although it's too early to start fishing it, we checed it out and even after the winter, it's looking better than it has for years with visible areas where the weed beds, lotus, lillies and rushes have got a foothold again and are well on the way to being re-established. Excellent. So I've been rationalising my floattube box for largemouth bass and catfish. I have this idea, that I can have a maximum of 12 patterns in different colours that will cover everything. I've not fully planneed it out yet, but I'm thinking probably 8 subsurface flies and 4 topwaters. Actually I'd like to have fewer, but we'll see how that goes. So far, I've got seaducers, whistlers, marabou leeches, things, bendbacks and bunny tailed snakes. The Whistlers and things are quite similar, so I might even switch to just one of them. I'll add a creaturey, crayfish fly and a worm for dragging the bottom and then turn my attention to top water and that's simple enough poppers, sliders, frogs. All in all that give's me 11, so I've wiggle room on my limit of 12 patterns. I'm not sure what else I'll add, but probably only having 11 patterns is better than 12 becasue it take's away an option without leaving me feeling like I'm missing out on anything I'll need.

Almost everything is getting tied new, except a couple of the more time consuming topwaters that I'm keeping in the box. It's quite good becasue I can pass the other old flies to John, as there's nothing really wrong with them I just don't like how my box got out of hand and chaotic. I much prefer to have a systematic approach that I can be confident in rather than carrying a load of stuff I don't really need. For an absolute beginner like John I think it's a good thing to have a load of flies, so he'll be less worried about losing them and can play around with different styles to see how they behave in the water gradually work out what he likes best for different situations. So I reckon it's a win-win.