Martyn White | Thursday, 24 October 2019
It's October, I've been fighting off my annual anticipatory depression about the coming winter for weeks now. The insane Indian summer we've been having has helped a lot - we had 2 days over 30 Celsius last week.
The smallmouth are still active, haven't moved downstream out of the smaller shallow rivers yet and are still catchable. It's still warm enough for wet wading too, although I'm sure that's down to an other couple of weeks at most. But the chances of big fish are high. Japan has Big smallmouth,being I didn't realise how big till a couple of North American friends got quite excited about a couple of fish I showed them...being scott and only really having experience of Japanese bass fishing, I just thought they were normal.
The carp and barbel are essentially a year round fishery here, but in winter they tend to eat half heartedly and don't really fight so well. The saving grace is that we get dry winters and the rivers are generally nice and clear, which is ideal for spotting fish and slower flows mean it's possible to use lighter flies that are a bit more civilised.
The only thing I look forward to in winter is the seabass, they start really feeding over the winter here and the bigger fish start to show up regularly. Assuming that the weather does cool down soon I'll get out for a few nights on Tokyo Bay, which is a bit different from tree lined rivers but fun nonetheless.
Anyway, I'll just have to keep fishing regardless of the shortening days and looming spectre of winter. Tight lines