Tracy&James | Sunday, 31 March 2024
A week into one of our saltwater trips is the typical timing of when things start to hurt. We've been taking advantage of the much longer fishing hours available in spring, when compared to autumn, to hit the flats hard. Some days we've left the flat when there was only just enough light to find our way back to the car, leaving with the moon clearly visible in the dusk sky. Actually one day we overshot our get-out point to find the car and because of that lost the light completely, and we ended up trying to find our vehicle by torch light (luckily our walkie-talkies have lights at the bottom of them. Actually this can be a bit annoying at times because the light is programmed to flash when the handset gets wet – this can subsequently drain the battery. This is perhaps the daftest design feature on any piece of equipment I've used – imagine being in an emergency situation where you need to use the radio only to find the battery is dead because it's been pointlessly flashing because it got splashed!). Anyway, we're both suffering from sore feet.
I always seem to fall into the same trap of waiting for a foot injury before I start taking precautions whilst wade fishing. When fishing such long days it doesn't take much to cause a painful injury – a bit of shell or grit inside a boot is usually enough. It's not until the boot and neoprene sock comes off that I notice that the building discomfort is a red-raw patch of skin with a laceration that is now weeping. Just putting the socks and boots on the next day is painful, and you end up hobbling around the flat trying not to make things worse. Where Tracy and I fish, sinking in sand or silt beyond the height of our ankles is unavoidable, thus stuff is going to get inside of our boots and socks unless measures are taken. Now I should have been doing this from day one, but I've now started wearing gaiters. I actually make these from old neoprene socks that have been holed – I just cut the foot part off (with the holes) and keep the ankle covering bit. I then use these to lock down my trouser bottoms to my wading boots. It's fairly effective, but not perfectly so. That said, my wounds seem to be healing and the red bits aren't getting redder. My soles still hurt but that's purely down to the mileage we're doing – and that's not going to change apart from the occasional day when the weather isn't great, such as today.
As far as the fishing is concerned, things have been going pretty well. We did have a spectacular day where we found tailing pods of bonefish from arrival on the flat, before midday, to the point where we had to leave in order to get off the flat before it was pitch black. We'd actually considered turning back to the car just before we got to the fish as we'd not seen anything at all in a couple of hours of wading – however we both agreed we'd push on a little bit further because it looked quite 'fishy' in the direction we were heading. We actually fished two flats during this bonanza – we used our new dry-bags that we've replaced our bum-bags with to help us swim across a channel to the adjacent area where bonefish were also tailing. Placing our shirts, caps, glasses and anything else we wanted to keep dry inside the bag, then trapping a load of air in it made for a great floatation device. Putting the rods on top of the bag with one arm whilst leaving the other free to paddle made the crossing easy, although there's still a slight feeling of unease as we know big sharks use these channels to commute also.
Today I hooked my first decent barracuda of the trip. Unfortunately I didn't get a great strip strike in and after a zig followed by a zag and a half jump, it came off. The build-up from spotting it to taunting it into taking the fly was exciting though. Neither of us has had any shots at sharks yet, if we don't count me teasing the big ones in the dock with my fly – whipping it away from them before they have the chance to swallow it. We did see a large shadow on the flat we were on yesterday but it was always moving away from us. Hopefully one will come close enough for a shot soon (not too close though!).
Have a great week and take care of your feet.
James.
