Like riding a bicycle

This time of the year everything warms up a bit around here. And with the warmth the bugs really start to get their boogie on. Drive anywhere around the countryside in the evening and your car will be peppered with bugs and this nocturnal activity gives a hungry trout a ton of protein that he might have missed over the cooler months. This translates to daytime too. Jase and I were hoping to be able to cash in on a feeding frenzy visit to a lake, but during the week the forecast was for overcast conditions so I knew it wouldn't fire on all cylinders. But we have to fish when we can, not when we want to, so plans were laid accordingly.

Having launched we set off under greyish white low hanging cloud. We deployed the Minn Kota and began to sneak between weed beds. The spotting was difficult, any wind at all would have made the glare impossible to see through. But we persevered and Jase racked up the first fish soon after. The trolling motor soon became useless when the remote control battery gave up the ghost, which left us in a predicament of having to move around using the outboard. With everything stacked against us we still did ok. I hadn't picked up a single hand rod since maybe January but my casting was still fine - its like riding a bicycle, even if you haven't done it for awhile you can still do it, maybe not perfectly but you get in the groove.

Glare on the water, not a bluebird day at all

Brownie

We'd also packed a bunch of 'meat pies' as Jase calls them - big streamers such as Galloup's Sex Dungeon as we'd decided to drive up the feeder river and drift down casting the big stuff into the overgrown banks. Jase was first up and put in some beautiful casts working the big fly behind logs and under overhanging willows. After our experience on the Rangitaiki earlier in the year, we'd expected to arouse the interest of plenty of fish but we simply weren't moving them.

We decided to swap places and I tied on a big old olive SD. First cast and a good sized brown moved at the fly but didn't hit. My heart boomed in my chest - that fish was one tail beat from eating!! The drift continued and in a big back water I put in a decent shot to the bank and a fish hit - on the jump it revealed itself as a 'bow, not the old brownie I'd expected. The fly was a big mouthful for the medium sized 'bow - its amazing how fish will hit those streamers.

We didn't manage anything else on the streamers despite hundreds of casts so decided to head back down to the flats for another drift. Jase fooled another couple of browns, watching the cat and mouse of a fish stalking a small damsel nymph from an elevated possie is ultra cool stuff.

Scenery was outstanding

We'll be back on sunny blue sky day, when those damsels get going ad the fish are in full munch mode.