Weekenders

Okay, I am pretty much resigned to the fact that this season is a total bust! The birth of son number three has hit my evening sessions incredibly heavily due to the other two boys playing merry havoc as it ensures they get to stay up late.

Anyway, enough of my parenthood musings and more to the fishing. I think in the past we may have changed our plans for the weekend however as I had managed to organise help for the wife for the couple of days it was a case of fish or nothing – we chose fish. Even though it rained pretty much constantly conditions could not have been better.

On the Thursday and Friday evening I had tied up a half dozen poly yarn olives, some high riding poly yarn and deer hair sedges as well as some nymphs and they did the business for the two days of hard fishing.

 

They are great flies and at some point I will post a proper picture of one but I reckon you can tell what it looks like.

Like I say over the course of the weekend we experienced some proper downpours. However, with proper waterproofs it did not matter one bit and we fished through them without any problems.

Still, when the sun came out between the rain showers this lonely old glen became simply stunning.

It turned out the first fish of the day was the best fish. Alex had kindly let me fish the first best looking pool on the beat, a trout took my nymph and gave an almighty big pull and was gone. Another few casts and a fish jumped clear out the water, I think it was a Salmon and a trout had took my nymph again. It ran around the pool and came to my net without any problem

The first beat was long and we searched all the pools and riffles for trout. Some of the spots looked ideal however were totally fishless.

We even braved a pool that was being guarded by a great big pale monster. I swear its balls were bigger than a couple of tennis balls together.

You can fish this pool first I said to Alex as I lay down in the grass for a bit of a rest.

We got out the tubes for the tail end of the first day, drifting down the loch picking up trout here and their.

I even had another double hook up out on the loch – no photos of it though.

Day two on a different beat was one helluva lot posher – It was the 2nd time we had managed to fish the beat as we had been deemed “the right sort” by the chap who ordinarily charges hundreds for Salmon or thousands for stalking. The cash we gave him probably paid for the weekend papers. Saying that we were very grateful even just for the chat at the end of the long day.

One memorable trout had me scaling down my flies and casting from a tricky spot for a half hour. Eventually I timed my cast to its rising pattern and set the hook into a small wily trout  that was one helluva lot wiser than some of its pals.

We ate shite all day, used the foulest language we could and drank cans of Stella. We then had a double whiskey with a pint and a steak pie in the campsite restaurant. We were pretty cold so sat in the car drinking rum and cokes out of our empty cans of Stella – we were reeking sheer class.