Finally a day I've been longing for with misty rain, humid and no wind which is the perfect conditions for trout fishing. Well they are for me because they're the conditions I love fishing in and not only that, the trout are usually on the take. After parking the car then having a thirty five minute walk through the paddocks I was soon in the river.
The light misty rain wasn't enough to bother me, all it did was to make me a little damp & the sunglasses fogged up so I had to fish without them. The river I'm fishing is small and has very low water level too but it still is good enough to fish today. Starting off with the usual gold aglia as I normally do it wasn't long before I had my first trout on the river bank seeing as I didn't take the landing net.
First trout of the day |
It was a nice solid 420 gram brown that I caught from a small flat water to the one side of a very narrow shallow fast water run. At last I have landed the first fish instead of losing it like I have done over the last few trips to the rivers. In saying that I did lose the next two browns before picking up another nice medium size fish over the following three shallow stretches of river.
The trout were easily spooked today mainly due to the river being so low. I approached quite a few stretches of water as quietly as possible even by staying out of the river and walking on the soft grassy river banks. They were darting off in all directions in the shallow water quite a few times as I tried to sneak up on them.
I caught one more before they went off the gold coloured spinner for some reason. I changed over to the small 40mm Daiwa ghost brown hard body lure to see if that would turn things around. It did, over the next four stretches of river I picked up four more browns from five hook ups.
The little lure was really doing the job for me now until I flicked it into the next pool where it was taken as soon as it hit the water. I barely had time to wind the reel when a trout smashed it from the surface when the lure hit the water. That trout then headed straight into a mass of snags in deep water, it had gone around a branch under the water a couple of times and then headed into the dead wood underneath it.
I went in as deep as I could and did manage to reach the branch the fish had wrapped the line around, but there wasn't any sign of the fish, it and the lure was nowhere to be seen. That's the second (out of 3) new Daiwa hard body lures I've lost in three trips now, something I've never done before.
I rarely ever lose any lures at all, normally I wear them out and have to retire them not lose them. I still had a few small Rapala's and Atomic lures in a small tackle box in my fishing vest plus another small tackle box full of Mepps spinners so all is not lost. I tried a F3 Rapala brown trout pattern and picked up a small brown and had a few follows before changing to the Atomic ghost gill shad lure.
I picked up two browns on that one before I headed into shallow water where I changed to a copper #00 Aglia spinner. So far I had caught nine browns, I wanted number ten before I headed for home. It did take me around thirty minutes before I had number ten on the river bank after hooking two and losing two others before it. I was hoping to catch 13 trout today to hit the 600 for the season but it wasn't to be, that will have to wait for the next trip now.
Adrian Webb
Well conditioned brown |
Trout number 9 on Atomic lure |
Finally trout No 10 for the day |
Brown hooked here |
Light tannin water |