OTHER DISCIPLINES CAN TEACH US A LOT
“There’s so much that we can learn from each other”
ACOUPLE of months back, not long after we were allowed back fishing, you may remember I wrote about an adventurous fly fishing trip I went on to a lake way up in the mountains of Snowdonia, in Wales. I was 2,000ft above sea level and totally out of my comfort zone tactics-wise, but I loved every minute of it and ended up catching a corker of a fish off the back of the wind.
It was quite harsh up the hill, and although the ‘windy bit’ would supposedly have the food blown into it, the calm bit at the back of the wind allowed me both to cast better and to present the fly better. It also seemed nicer there, and if I was a fish, that’s where I would have been.
Talking to my companion Ceri Thomas, an expert in the art of the fly, he said that a lot of fly anglers prefer to fish off the back of the wind, as this is where the terrestrials get blown in – beetles, bugs and the like. The fish stack up and wait for them, often loitering at the back of the wind, not the end of it, so they can be first in the queue. This is almost the opposite of what we as coarse anglers like to do.
A message from a lad on Facebook asked me the same thing. He’d been catching on zigs on the back of the wind rather than on the deck at the windy end when others were blanking. The trout anglers’ thoughts rang true. The warmer, flatter, calmer water is where the fly hatches can do their thing normally and the carp were taking advantage too. It’s one of the things I love about crossing disciplines and boundaries. There’s so much that we can learn from each other.