Thailand

Just spent a fantastic couple of weeks travelling round some of the islands in the south of Thailand.

This surely earns me enough brownie points with Mrs C to enable me to spend the rest of the summer on the river bank.

The angling bug got the better of me though & after several Singhas & Sangsom buckets I got chatting to a Mr Sak who promised me a 80-90% chance of landing a Sailfish!

Here's Mr Sak skippering his Longtail boat - basically a long wooden skiff with a dirty diesel engine attached to the back, powering a propellor at the end of a long shaft... genius!

First off, we jigged some feathers for the live bait.

Then we set them off in a channel & waited... alas no Sailfish were hooked, just this Garfish looking thing with some mad dentistry!

Cant Clough, can't catch (almost)

Jonny took us up to Cant Clough, one of his club waters on Sunday, a high moorland res perched in the Pennines near Todmorden. It took about four hours to cover the water & in that time we threw everything at them & almost blanked. It wasn't that we weren't getting takes, we just couldn't land anything. The fish were taking lightning quick & just shaking the hook everytime. Only when I beefed up my gear a little & stripped back a lure did I manage to bully one in.

Lunksville

Spotted a pod of three fish sipping down flies tight to the near bank under some branches & managed to waft a little EHC just in front of them with a side cast. With a big swirl the fish took & shot off upstream jolting the rod forward & stripping line. It jumped once trying to shake the fly then I didn't see it for the next five minutes as it bored up & down the river. As usual I'd forgotten my net so had to hand him in.

You can see the fly just knicked in the scissors.

mink or gollum

With the temperature creeping up into the teens today so my Trout barometer shifted me riverwards accordingly. There was a little bit of a hatch & the odd fish was rising sporadically so I decided to try something Stuart Crofts suggested at a talk he gave to Horwich fly dressers, he recommended fishing a buzzer New Zealand style off a dry, not a fly combo I had previously tried on rivers but, one that definitely works. An injury I'm seeing increasingly on Trout in the river, it's not like the Heron stab marks you sometimes see on fish, this is more like a chunk that has been bitten out. I'm sure this is down to the mink that are present as the river here is devoid of Cormorant, Goosanders & Gollum.

British Summer Time

The clocks had gone forward & the start of summer was heralded in with a fine sunny Sunday, so with that I donned my waders & ploughed up the river in search of Trout.
A nice hatch of Olives was trickling down stream all afternoon & that gave me the chance to do what I'd been waiting for all winter... Target rising brownies with dries!

High Winds High Arnside

I was up in the Lakes on Friday for a mates stag do so while the rest of the lads were off doing the Via Ferrata up Honister slate mines I slipped off to try and find a spot to fish. Heights really aren't my bag!

With the wind gusting at 50mph I searched the map for a spot that might offer a little shelter & settled for the beautiful little High Arnside Tarn.

I was surprised upon arriving that considering the conditions & the fact that there is still snow on the fells the Tarns surface was covered with slashy little rises. There was a steady hatch going off but I couldn't really see what because as soon as they emerged within seconds they were half way up the Old Man! That would account for the quick slashy rises.

The Tarn is absolutely choked up with weed thus surface or just subsurface fishing is the only option. I caught a few small brownies fishing a little Caddis in the ripple but by far the most effective method was a little buzzer suspended beneath a parachute fly.

One of the bigger ones!

Signs of spring

On the walk back down I came across this pair of just born lambs taking their first tentative steps & eagerly guzzling down their mothers milk. If you look close enough you can still see the afterbirth dangling from the Ewe!

P-Funk Piking

Tom commented that my latest Pike fly bares more than a passing resemblance to the P-Funk legend George Clinton... I can definitely see where he's coming from!

This week I've really noticed that it's getting brighter & warmer, so with that 'George' & I snook down the river for a dabble. After searching out the weir pool for a while with George getting a couple of follows, a nice fish shot out and after a few good runs & a bit of tail walking to boot a superbly conditioned Pike was netted.

The flies have eyes

Here's a new Pike fly that I'm sure will coax out a monster next trip:

Hook: 6/0 mustad Cod hook
Body: cactus chenille
Tail: combed out parpost wing

Aspen-on-Toon

Skiing in Cumbria???? That was the response I got when I answered my phone at the top of Yad Moss on Saturday afternoon.
Yad Moss or 'Aspen-on Toon' as a Geordie I was chatting to called it or 'Englands premier ski resort' as their website calls it is located in the north east of Cumbria about 30 miles east of Penrith near Alston. Thanks to a lottery grant & the hard work of some dedicated enthusiasts Yad Moss offers the opportunity to ski within a couple of hours of Manchester, albeit for usually a handful of days a year.

View from the top station - 725m

Tweedy having a brew

Manchester has got everything except a beach...

Manchester has got everything except a beach said Ian Brown... well, Salford has got one & that's where I spent a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.I'd been keen to try out some of the Pike flies I've been knocking out over the last few weeks & todays milder temperature combined with the lack of rainfall recently left me feeling that I might be in luck today.
I started fishing through a 100 yrd stretch below the weir with the Moulin Rouge fly that I'd had high expectations of but to no avail, not even a sniff of a follow.
At the tail end of the beat I changed fly to the one shown above that uses just artificial fibres, the main body being made of flouro green para post wing material, which pulses beautifully on the retrieve, the other main benefit is that it sheds any water on the backcast making it a much easier fly to shoot out.
Third cast with this new fly saw a nice Pike flash out of the murk close to the bank & snatch the lure, thankfully the hook set & the fish tore off on several really good runs which left me cursing that I'd left my net right at the top of beat.

moulin rouge pike fly

Just tied a new pike fly, here's the ingredients:

Hook: kamasan 6/0 uptide
Body: mink zonker strip, llama hair, red sparkle
Hackle: taken from a red feather boa at a moulin rouge themed christmas party.

a spot of winter piking

It's been ages since I last got out on the banks but, I managed a couple of short Piking sessions this weekend. I had originally planned to try a few pike flies I'd been knocking out but, with the wind & the freezing temps I didn't fancy stripping a wet fly line through icy fingers so opted to chuck some plugs about.

shizzle my mizzle

Anyone who looks at this blog is going to think I only post when I bag a lunker but shit has been conspiring against me this summer and it's been nearly 2 months since I last pulled on my (rancid) waders, so it was with great delight that I ventured out into the glorious August mizzle.

After a barren couple of hours after a barren couple of months I was seriously thinking I'd lost my mojo and just as I was contemplating finding a screen to watch the return of the prodigal son SWP to MCFC I hit a rich vein of form teasing out fish after fish from the faster riffles.

What a belter! Bring on September!

A reason to like Big Brother?

I've found a reason to like Big Brother - It gives me a legitimate excuse to leave the house & go fishing at 9 when the wife insists on watching it.

Again had a really enjoyable last couple of hours fishing into the dark, striking at splashes & hoping to connect to a monster fish.

Twilight trouting

God I love this time of year!!!!!

Jibbed out for an after the Portugal Germany game on Thursday & had a fantastic hour targeting rising fish in the twilight. The slower glassy smooth glides that have seemed to be devoid of fish so far this year came alive in the perpetual dusk.

The fishing was electric but, the midges were worse than anything in Scotland. It was great to be able to thread a new fly on in the light after being snapped by a lunker but, the midges drive you to distraction, so much so that I missed a number of takes whilst scrathing my head. I'll be back this weekend armed with hat & jungle formula!

Saturday

The first of the day after finally getting out of bed about 2pm
A heron like Tom stalking his quarry under the trees.

Monday evening

Had a couple of hours wading the river on Monday evening, wasn't sure what'd be doing as it had been 23 during the day & the bright sun was still on the water till 8 o'clock, with this in mind I opted to try some tree covered tunnel like sections. There was plenty of fly activity on the water with a hatch of little up winged Olives occuring which the trout were sipping down in the shaded riffles, so I decided to try out a little Sparkle Dun I'd tied.

The sparkly tail is meant to represent the shuck of the emerging fly as it sits in the surface film waiting to fly off thus making it an easy & tempting morsel for a waiting trout.

The fly worked really well accounting for all the fish of the evening, I did try a little Deer Hair Emerger but, they didn't seem interested but were quite happy slashing at the sparkle.

Leeches! - Found these blood sucking little bastards while turning rocks looking for bugs. I should start collecting them & practicing a bit of bloodletting, I believe it's making a comeback in the NHS.

Dirty Old Town

Ahhhh bucolic Salford! - Spent an enjoyable evening down the ship canal with Mike last week among the Herons, Waterfowl & freely rising fish, the calm waters were only intermittently interupted by a booming cox from one of the sweeping skiffs - surely a scene more reminiscent of Henly than Pomona Docks!

Is this a first for the ship canal? - a dry fly caught roach (pic courtesy of Mike - Manchester fishing fiend blog)

Mayfly Time - Ullswater

Here's some pics from the New Zealand lads reunion weekend on Ullswater. Myself, Rich(Leeds) Elksy(Stoke) & Tom Spent the weekend camped out on Ullswater in anticipation of a decent hatch of Mayfly.
We canoed over to a little secluded bay in the newly acquired HMS Bob Woolmer and set up camp for the weekend. It's been a while since we went feral but, we slipped into the old ways with ease. In the pic you can see HMS Bob in the foreground, Rich in the back ground setting up a tarp & the 'fridge' is just off to right in the lake.
The view from camp looking down Patterdale - truly stunning!
Friday nights evening meal consisted of grilled Rainbow Trout & baked potatoes courtesy of Tom & his Dad fresh from Ghyll Head earlier in the day.

After waking up to sausages & beer for breakfast & a flat calm Ullswater we decided to make a trek up to a hill Tarn for a cast.

There was a shed load of Caddis crawling all over the place.A beautiful little Tarn brownie.
Later that evening back at camp, Tom spotted a nice brownie sipping mayfly off the surface from his vantage point perched on a rocky bluff & managed to drop an Adams right in its tracks and bagged this superb Ullswater Brown!

Wahey!