Cast off worries
THERE’S been a bit of a troutmaster-style contest running after work recently, long summer nights and short session tickets at a round robin of local trout fisheries.
Venues like Howwood, Cloybank and High Cleughearn make it an easy option for some top-notch fishing.
There are a few things that will help polish up and maybe give you an edge when you’re on a small stillwater.
Work the margins – go to any fishery and you’ll see an angler walking to a peg, peeling 30 yards of line off the reel and trying to cast to the other side.
Let’s be honest, we’ve all done this and it doesn’t often work.
You’ve probably lined feeding fish feeding on or near the surface.
Treat it like a river angler setting up a few yards away from the edge, peel a few yards of line off and work the fringes or margins first.
These areas hold vast amounts of easy pickings for the trout.
Look for structure – anything that breaks the flow of water, creating a seam that brings in food is a place worth a cast.
This flow can carry small bugs or bigger items like drowning daddies, hawthorns and even empty buzzer shucks, on which the trout can become preoccupied.
Tree branches, fence posts or weed beds all house food items and offer shelter. No need for them to risk swimming into open water when you’ve got a larder to hand.
Offering your flies into these areas can reap great rewards.
Mix up your retrieve – this is one I really struggle with. Casting out then making the same pull, pull retrieve offers very little in the way of realism or a trigger for fish.
It’s too easy to get caught up in the hypnotic rhythm of cast and retrieve.
Ask competition anglers what they do and they’ll tell you to keep changing your retrieve to fool the fish.
Trout get accustomed to watching the same flies, being pulled at the same speed, with nothing to entice them to take.
Always be conscious of what you’re doing and if it’s not working, mix up figure of eights, short fast plucks, longer pulls and stops, to provoke a reaction.
Don’t follow the crowd – if you arrive somewhere and everyone’s fishing floaters catching intermittently you might do the same.
You don’t know the depth the fish are at or what fly has been doing the business or any number of factors.
It’s easy to spend too long mimicking but catching nothing. Check out the catch report in the hut and watch the water when you arrive. Even two or three minutes spent looking at and into the water is time well spent.
Look at what’s on the surface, what insects are hatching and learn to recognise different rise forms and watch for subsurface activity before deciding to set up a sink tip, a full floating or get deep with a sinker to target fish in the cooler depths.