Flicking feathers

 An old one I wrote for  www.sexyloops.com   Now the rains have stopped and the rivers have cleared up, I've been out wreaking havoc on the local carp.Some days are better than others, but even on the real scorchers I'm catching a couple before retreating back to aircon. There aren't many big fish in the river by me except where it enters the lake, but there are lots of fish in the 3-8lb bracket. I was talking about this in an online carp on fly group and was told by several people that I'd catch more if I fed them with dog biscuits and fished an imitation - not interested. At all.  Amazingly, my reply that I prefer fly fishing to bait fishing caused these folk to take umbrage. A barrage of comments about fishing commercial, stocked fisheries making feeding necessary and hilarious accusations of snobbery followed. All of it is ludicrous of course, we all draw our own lines in the sand. But catching a chummed fish is not the same achievement as spotting, stalking and cat

I took a guy from the office fishing.   He'd been asking to go for a while, but it took ages to get the schedules all worked out.   I always enjoy indoctrinating new acolytes.  As we live on opposite sides of Tokyo, we decided to meet at a river a couple of hours to the North of the city, with a good head of carp, bass and catfish.  Nothing too difficult on the casting front and with plenty of opportunities so he'd be in with a chance. Gerard told me he had fished before, but when we got down to the river and I handed him the rod, it quickly became clear that he had been a bit confused on the difference between fly fishing and bait fishing. We spent an hour or so on a quiet pool going through some basic casting before making our way along the river in search of willing fish. It took some time but after a while he managed a couple of decent short shots that were good enough to get an eat had they gone in first time. It was getting close.  It was great to watch help with s