Martyn White | Thursday, 2 March 2023
It's been a good week of fishing here. Along with the usual local carp, I went out for seabass on Monday with Canadian John and then on Tuesday hit another river in search of maruta (pacific redfin).
The carp fishing was fine, we had some pretty nice weather for sight fishing so I made a few pre-work forays and had a few fish, nothing special but a nice diversion of a morning.
The seabass was very enjoyable, probably because I didn't get out so much this winter. The fishing wasn't on fire, but still good. It took a while to find fish and we didn't find any areas with lots of fish eager to eat. It was more a case of finding one or two fish wiling to eat and then having to move on in search of more. The rubber candy, surprise surprise, was the go to fly. Interestingly on these neutral fish it even out performed conventional lures, John struggled to get a bite on a soft plastic and eventually managed to get a few fish on a small rapala. All my fish came when I stopped the retrieve and let the fly hang near the structure. Another reason you should be carrying rubber candies instead of surf candies!
The maruta fishing is just starting to get going, there aren't huge numbers of them in the river just yet and it took me a while to find any and when I did, they were up in a skinny riffle on their first spawn of the run- each fish spawns several times while in the river- so I decided to leave them alone and roll an egg sucking worm off the riffle and into the head of the pool below. I picked up a few nice barbel, my first for ages actually which was nice. I've got a bit of time off this month so I'll get plenty of chances on them and the maruta.
Tomorrow I'm off to Tochigi to target some smallmouth with Chuck, who reckons he's got a new, better crayfish presentation that's just destroying fish, so that should be interesting.