I've been checking a few new-to-me shore locations around Tokyo bay over the last few weeks. Some of them are right in the city, like down by the Olympic village. Others are thankfully a bit out of the way. It's been fun, even if it has meant fewer fish than I might usually expect. This is the kind of situation where I don't mind blanking though. Each visit to a mark helps to build a picture of the area and what it's like at different tides. Of course fish are welcome, but I'm OK with some slow sessions if it means I can manage some more consistent success in future.
This week I've been to a promising place, a nice esturine area with a couple of islands, some nice channels and other manmade structure. The first visit I went down during the day without the rod and just had a walk around, at low tide to see what was what. I like to do this where possible as I'll often be fishing at night and it's a good idea to have some kind of picture of what is in front of you. It also helps make estimates about where to start and which points are likely to be good. The next time I arrived about an hour before sunset which let me catch the last 2 hours of the rising tide and the first couple of the fall. I had a mooch around and started at one of the river mouths. There was nothing fancy about my approach; an intermediate and a 7" blurple Tabory's snake on a 6ft leader. As I more or less expected I didn't catch although I did get a couple of bumps, probably small fish judging from the erratic shakey feel. Could I have caught those fish with a smaller fly? Probably, but that wasn't really the point. It's still nice to get that little bit of action just to keep the confidence up. I'm heading back down on afternoon to fish the falling tide into dark, I'm still going to be treating it as an image building exercise, but as the season is progressing and the larger fish will mostly be moving out into the bay by now, I'll probably fish something a bit smaller. John is coming with his spinning rod-which I hope he's more proficient with now- and he'll be able to help cover water to some degree.
The boat trips are always more productive and I reckon I'll squeeze in one more before the spawn kicks off, but I do enjoy getting out and cracking some of the more challenging stuff on my own.
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