It was a good day to be out fishing but I was run down from a crazy week at work and not feeling well enough to travel the 5 hours round trip to Wales to fish my favourite Llyns. So I headed off to the local canal for a quick dabble for an hour. Despite joining the coarse fishing club almost 9 months ago I was yet to give it a go. It was a learning experience as the canal towpath was busy despite it being a Sunday morning. Keeping an eye out for cyclists, runners and walkers who appear literally out of nowhere while casting detracts from the relaxing nature of the fishing experience. However, the many trees, bridges and bramble hedges provided a good range of casting conditions that are almost comparable to casting on many rivers, good practice indeed.
The first hour was a little quiet so I decided to head for a spot where I had seen coarse fisherman while out walking on previous occasions, my thinking being that the fish might be used to getting fed and be a little more amenable to my offerings of a bead headed hares ear nymph (point), diawl bach (middle dropper) and chenille blood worm (top dropper). It wasn’t long before the first twitch of the line was felt and I lifted into a small roach. Well tiny really … and I had foul hooked him. It was about 15 minutes later that my line went taught and this time I was into something a bit more substantial and landed a handsome looking perch with dorsal fin all raised and looking magnificent (not that I could get the fish to replicate this for the photo though). The barbless hook came out in the net so handling was kept to an absolute minimum.
Aside from the fish that had been caught I had also caught sight of a kingfisher. The trip had been a success and I was determined to make use of this local resource far more than I have to date.
As I have noted before, fishing trips are more than just fishing for me. On the return walk I decided to see how many wild flowers I could photograph as the hedgerow was alive with spring colour. It wasn’t long before I had more than 10 and some interesting colour variations of some fairly common wild flowers. I have enjoyed attempting to identify then this week and learnt a great deal. I will create a wildflowers section under the resources section in the coming weeks.
Tight Lines
Greg
