The weather, more particularly the wind has been making things difficult this week, so it was Saturday before I was able to visit Siblyback. There seemed to be a small window of lighter winds in-between a 20mph morning and a 50mph night.
A few people had braved the winds that day and one of the season ticket holders had been rewarded with about 10 fish, half returned caught on black fritz-based flies and orange ones. Apparently there had been a few anglers earlier in the day and he believed they had all done well catching about 5 fish apiece.
The wind was still strong at 3.30pm which is when I got to the bank and blowing pretty much straight into my face. I guessed it would be this way, so not wanting to walk all the way to the other side had set up with a Hi-D line and a booby on a 4ft leader. This was about the only way I was going to cut through that wind without a very long walk.
Started off just short of the bird hide and my plan was to gradually work my way back. First couple of casts produced several taps and rattles so some fish were there. I carried on like this for half an hour and changed the colour of my fly a couple of times. I just could not hook up. Had maybe 6 opportunities and no matter whether I struck, continued my retrieve, stopped the retrieve, slowed down or speeded up I failed to catch.
By about 4.30 the wind had eased considerably so I switched to an intermediate line and a black&green tadpole. There had also been a couple of splashy rising showing that one or two fish were higher in the water. It wasn’t long before I caught the first fish, a rainbow of about 1 ¾ lbs.
It then went quiet, so I moved about 100 yds back. There were fish there and I caught a couple more on a medium figure of eight retrieve.
Moved again to the carved bench in two meadows. Two more fish caught on the tadpole before moving again back towards the car park. By now it really had calmed off to a gentle breeze and there were a few fish rising and a few small dark buzzers about. The area of the little marsh was flat calm.
……..different from earlier!
Tempted to change to a buzzer as I saw from the returns that a few fish had been caught on buzzers. However, I only planned on fishing a little while longer so took the lazy option and didn’t change.
The fish were still obliging and found that fishing the fly only a foot or so deep worked. Two more rainbows resulted. All fish caught were returned.
Its unfortunate but we had to cancel Sundays Siblyback Fly Fishers Association monthly competition due to persistent 50mph winds. This has been rescheduled to the following Sunday, 17th March. The long-term forecast looks good, so hopefully it will be going ahead.
Something I have come across that may be worth bearing in mind is that anglers are not always recording catch and release fish caught. This seems to have happened on occasions where an angler has retained 5 fish and continued with barbless (or de-barbed hooks) and continued with catch and release. On two occasions recently I have had conversations with anglers who have had a great days fishing, catching up to 10 fish, but when I have later seen their return card it has just shown the fish retained i.e. 5 fish, but not included those released. I know of at least 8 fish returned this week that have not been recorded.
Maybe something needs to be put up in the permit room? In the long term it may be an idea to include a column against fish caught to tick whether retained or released on the return cards?