Various Activities

We're having a LOT of rain which is keeping the rivers high, a bit too high at times, but it's got the maruta running. With better weather forecast, things should be getting good on the freestones for them soon. I went down to one in search of my first maruta of the year. It was a bit high but I did manage to find some fish, unfortunately they were already getting on with their first spawn. so I left them alone and fished the riffle and top of the pool below them for a bit. This os one of my favourite situations for catching barbel and I usuallycatch my best barbel of the year during the maruta run. I don't think this week's fish will be the biggest barbel this year, but a chenille worm with an orange tungsten bead and a small yellow & orange ice dub spawn imitatation rolled along the bottom accounted for a couple of fish each before I called it a day. If the river had been in better order, I'd have stayed longer, but it was raining pretty heavily and the water was rising

The river by me is just chocolate brown, so I'm leaving it alone. I went down for a look and although it wasn't flowing very fast, thanks to the fact that it runs through paddy fields it was unfishably coloured up. I did try, and probably spent longer than I should have looking around trying to spot fish, but eventually called it a day after a couple of hours without even making a cast. Not the end of the world as i had been planning to go to immigration to renew my visa, but vouldn't because HR couldn't get their end sorted properly.. If a bad day's fishing is better than a good day of work, it's certainly even more so than the hell of Japanese bureaucracy!

Dave seemed oddly keen to hit the bass on Monday.I was tired and nursing a hangover so not super keen on staying up to fish through the middle of the night, but I gamely got set up while I waited for Dave to arrive. It was still light when we set out and to be honest I was already happy to call the seabass season over until September. The first spot we stopped at, there were fish around and there was nice current, but not really enough darkness to make the fish confident and the shade line from the dock light effective. We picked a couple up tucked right under a boat, but it was slow so we decided to make a run offshore to give night a full chance to fall. Once we started Dave was picking fish up pretty consistently, certainly more than I was. We were both fishing the same lines and leader set ups but while I was fishing a translucent candy, he was fishing a solid white pattern tied from Chinese fiber he got off aliexpress. Dunno what it is, but it looks good in the right conditions. Anyway, as tired as I was, I was fed up with getting beat so I switched to a rubber candy and slowed down the retrieve giving the fish something that was easier to see and catch. It worked, and while I was never going to overtake Dave for a win, I managed to pull things back to approaching a draw. It wasn't a bad night, but I'm not going out again till after summer.