Embiggening

 

The weather has been awful here over recent weeks and the fishing has been suffering as a result. Dirty rivers, often too high to fish have become fairly normal, with only a few opportunities to get out on my local river presenting themselves. It seems unlikely I'll make it offshore for mahi and tuna this summer too.

But it's not all bad. My mate John has asked me to help him pick out a rod, it'll be a spinning rod to get him started on the seabass over the winter. I'm pretty confident that he'll have some fairly quick success on the lures and then we can move him over to the fly once he's hooked.

The down time has also given me a chance to catch up on a couple of fly orders for friends and mess about with my own seabass box. I might start the seabassing a bit early this year if the rivers continue to be in poor condition. I'm not really changing much in my box, but I've been chatting with Yasuda-san the captain I like to fish with and we're going to really push things on the fly size front for the big, pre-spawn fish that are usually feeding on big scad, mackerel and smaller bass in the autumn. Generally about 8" is as large as I fish, but some of the lure fishermen and some fly guys have been going bigger and seeing good result so we're going to push it a bit more. We're going to experiment a bit and  see how big we can go. I've been tying some Popovics' beast fleyes up to about a foot long and several inches deep. This lined up nicely as I was doing an online tying class last weekend on hollows and beasts, so I had to sit down and tie a few. If they work I might go a bit bigger, but that would probably be more for novelty than anything else.

The times when I have managed to get out on the river have given me a new problem to solve on the carp front. I'm not quite there yet, but when I get it worked out I reckon I'll be onto something special if possibly controversial.