Viking Lars | Monday, 18 June 2018
Paul is out of reach, and he's also busy planning a visit and it's Mrs. Sexyloops' birthday tomorrow, so there are flowers to be bought and food to be prepped, I suppose :-).
So - just a short one from me today. First of all, sorry about the missing FP last Saturday. For once I acutally had to FPs written and in the backend's pipeline, but somehow the one for last Saturday wasn't there when I needed it. Probably an uploiad error on my part, so I apologise for that.
It seems that our long hot, extremely dry early summer is cooling down for now (thank you very much). We desperately need rain for the rivers to pull up more fish and move the fish that are there around a little. But none the less, it's fishing weather again - windy, overcast, cooler, so all we need is rain - and lot's of it, please.
I've been waiting for cooler weather to visit "my" trout lake, and I'm quite worried about what the heatwave might have done to it. However, it is a derelict gravelpit and I've never experienced it getting really hot, so maybe it's in good shape - I certainly hope so. It's been a long time. May and June are good times on that lake with fair insect activity, so I can usually find a rising trout. More than a handful of times I even been so lucky as to find patrolling trout (usually rainbows). They rise a certain number of times along a path, only to disappear for 2-3-4-5 minutes where they return to the beginning and patrol the same path again.
This is really interesting behaviour and quite a challenge to catch them. They'll rise a specific intervals in both space and time along their path, so not only are you required to place a fly (looking like what ever they're feeding on) *very* precisely, but you also have to do it at the right time. If possible with wind and any current, it's sometimes possible to place the fly a few rises ahead, so to speak, but that always holds the risc of the fly drowning, getting pulled away or (God forbid) streaming as the trout passes.
The PoD is a nice rainbow that was patrolling 5 inches from the reeds on the bank, caught on a #18 emerging buzzer!
You may only get a few chances as sometimes, they'll patrol a path only 3-4-5 times and then it's over. But then I simply switch rods and go back to pulling a wet, stripping a streamer or nymphing. That's why I always have two rods in the float tube - one with a long belly floating WF and one with a shooting head setup.
Have a great week - maybe I'll be back Tuesday, maybe Paul will cover - nobody knows :-).
Lars