Why?

Mid-week we had a nice warm day and I walked up the river looking for carp. The river was a bit high and dirty which made spotting fish challenging, not ideal, but not impossible. The problem seemed to figuring the fish out. I fully expected to find a few active fish that I would have a shot at, and that if things went to plan would eat a worm. The only problem was all the fish I could find were just hanging negatively, barely moving and certainly not fish to cast to. Eventually I did, but with no success. I tried different flies and presentations, but the fish were having none of it. I wasn't that put out, because none of the fish seemed to be even middling percentage shots, and if there were active fish around I'd juat have walked on rather than trying to catch those negative ones. I don't know exactly why the fish weren't active, usually a warming spring day has them feeding and I'm pretty sure a couple of stable days would have turned them on. Whatever the reason, they weren't playing.

Monday saw an early start and me heading up to Tochigi. Chuck had been messaging me with forecast updates, they'd had a nice warming trend with temps coming up from low singles on Friday to mid teens by Monday with plenty of cloud cover. When I arrived it was warm with a high, thick overcast and a light southerly breeze. The river was slightly low and only lightly stained. It looked perfect for some early smallmouth and we were both pretty excited. It seemed exactly like the kind of conditions that usually result in great days, especially for those big pre-spawn fish that are waking up to the early spring crayfish and start trying to put on condition before the procreation starts. We hit all the usual spots first, but after a couple of hours without so much as a sniff hopes started to drop. As usual we were fishing differently and trying to fins out what they wanted, we do that and just let the fish tell us what they want. Unfortunately they didn't want to tell us. We stuck it out for a while and decided to crawl crayfish patterns around structures in the hope of picking up a sympathy eat from a neutral fish, or a bite window opening up. The little tungsten bugs were finding bottom and maintaining contact perfectly, They had to work! The only action of the day came around three in the afternoon, with a fish tapping my craw twice without committing to a full eat. Chuck had just come up from another pool and was standing on the bank watching me fish and got really excited the seccond time the curve of line from my rod tip ticked up. "he's fuckin' with ya before he eats it! they're goin to start switching on!" Unfortunately the fish didn't commit and although it was enough to get the confidence up a bit keep us fishing for longer than we would have stuck it out, nothing else happened. This was far more disappointing than the previous carp session, because things seemed perfect but we just couldn't figure it out. We saw a few spin fisherman but they were in the same situation as us. Whatever it was it was annoying, but I'm not sure what we could have done differently if we could have done something to make it happen. It's something to think about, but realistically I have no ideas at the moment. I'm heading elswhere this week looking for smallies and to see if the maruta have started turning up yet.