Martyn White | Thursday, 3 March 2022
Tokyo seems to be getting warmer at last, we've had a far colder and longer winter than I can remember in years here, which has been keeping a lot of things slow so it's nice to have some of the fishing starting to show signs of getting going. Although, as I discovered on Monday we're not out of the woods yet.
We'd had several days with high single figure temperatures and maybe even a couple creeping up to double digits in the afternoons. This is exactly the kind of thing that switches the carp and smallmouth on early in the year, so I was keen to go and get in amongst it on Monday and was planning to go either up to Tochigi or down to Kanagawa to hit one of the larger rivers. Unfortunately we had a couple of sub zero nights over the weekend which made me change my plans, better to stay local and pick the peak hours for temperatures and light. So I waited till about 10 and headed up my local stream for a mooch around for a few hours when the sun and temperature were highest. Despite the cold snap I was expecting to find plenty of active fish as the day went on.
I didn't. It was very strange, I walked a good 5k of river and saw very few carp and no bass, just loads of filter feeding herabuna. All the usual spots I'd expect to find fish in these conditions were empty or almost empty of fish. I don't really know why, but I wonder if the late 2 day cold snap coupled with a low water level caused most of the fish to drop back into the lake. Either way it was a struggle to find fish, even more of a struggle to find feeding fish so when I did there was more pressure on getting the shot right. The first fish I had a shot at I spooked by dropping the fly too close, not by much but too close is too close. It was a good half hour before I got another shot, This might not seem much but I usually expect to find 40 or 50 feeders on this stretch of river. My second shot went in nicely and the fish ate, but I was too slow on the hook set which is annoying on days like that. Just as I was getting ready to accept defeat and head home I had a third shot which went in nice and resulted in a nice if quite small carp coming to the net and saving my blushes. Even though it was a tough day, it was still a lot of fun and certainly helped reset the demons for the week.
It's getting warmer again this week and we're getting some rain too. I'm tempted to go local again this week to see what difference it makes, but if the weather holds I'll probably have to head somewhere else in search of bigger carp or smallmouth.