Very often at Wimbleball Lake it is a case of having to find the fish. The wind on Saturday was blowing from the north, that's the end with the bridge, but even so the local guru had indicated that Bessoms and Ruggs were still fishing well. These local guru types are like ghillies in Scotland and should be listened to on pain of death. So we listened and, at 9:00am on the nose, motored off up the lake toward Bessoms Bridge and Ruggs Bay.
It is notable this year that so far all the fish have been coming from very close in to the banks and so even though the wind was against us we were encouraged when we managed to establish a nice drift that took us down the shore of Bessoms, that's the bay below the bridge in the north arm, and then another that took us all the way from the top of Ruggs Bay, with the bird hide opposite Bessoms, past buoy number nine and down the western shore. So confident were we that we did the first drift twice and the second no less than three times, taking in all the water both sides of Blue Buoy No.9 (normally a great drift). We were working very hard with both floaters and sinking lines but by 2:30 we had precisely NO fish in the bag; the only high points being me connecting but ultimately losing a fish and my boat partner getting so distraught at his unaccustomed lack of success that he took it out on a bottle of beer which saw him almost remove his top lip with the resulting breakage..................but I guess you had to be there!
3:00pm found us around the corner at Cowmoor bay. This is as far away as you can go in a straight line from the end of the jetty at the boat moorings and the wind was blowing diagonally so that we could, with the help of the electric motor engineer a drift that took us from Blue Buoy No.5 all the way down the southern shore to the end. It was here that we found the fish and by 5pm, when I had had quite enough as it was pouring with rain and very cold, we had 11 fish between us!
The fish were not in a buzzery mood. It was blowing a whooly and raining and they were in a chasing frame of mind. The important thing about all this though is not the flies or lines that we were using (black tadpoles on both sinking and floating - it didn't seem to matter). It is the fact that we searched until we found the fish.
Cowmoor is further down the wind than Bessoms, but not as far away as the Upton Arm, which was the most down wind area on the day, and so we probably should have gone there first (Cowmoor that is not the Upton Arm). We realised this afterwards.
I suppose we can learn two things from this day.
- Local gurus are NOT always right
- Don't give up
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND
