Since joining the NFFC about a month ago I hadn’t had a chance to fish any of the club waters. Thankfully I put an end to this over the weekend.
On Sunday morning I picked up Nick Nortje (I write his full name since he likes it popping up in Google) and we headed to Mavela, one of the club waters. We arrived at around 7am and were on the water by half past seven.
Mavela is a largish body of water with good clarity. It is relatively shallow (as far as I could see) with a lot of weed beds. All in all it looked like a great spot for trout.
While tackling up we noticed a lot of activity on the surface, and when I got down to the water I saw why – there were a lot of hatches taking place. I had already kitted up with an intermediate line, and being a bit lazy, decided to fish it for a while before changing to a floating if I need be.
Nick started off by fishing his was across the dam wall, while I opted to fish up a bank where there was a lot of surface action. After fishing all the usual suspects on my intermediate, with not even a touch, I decided it was time to try a floating line with some dries. This too proved to be unsuccessful.
Having said that, I’ve never fished dry flies on stillwaters, and I was unsure of exactly how to tackle it. The obvious answer would be to cast a dry in amongst feeding fish, and then give it the odd twitch every now and then. However the fish weren’t feeding in one area, so throwing it out and leaving it there seemed fruitless and counter productive – besides of course being highly frustrating. Stripping them in slowly also didn’t seem to be the correct approach. My solution was therefore to attach a dropper to the dry, and fish it with a slow retrieve over the weedbeds. Good idea, kak results!
At this point two other fisherman arrived with tubes, and we watched intently, wondering if they’d have more luck in their tubes than we were having on the bank. We continued fishing while they kitted up and made their way into the water.
As luck would have it, literally 5 minutes after they got their tubes into the water, I picked up a decent Rainbow of about 15 inches on a dragon fly nmyph. The fish was strong, fought hard and looked to be in good condition. Thanks Nick for letting me catch the first fish in my club waters. *Bwahaaa*
After that we struggled for another few hours before Nick managed to pick up a good cock fish, of around the same size, in full breeding colours. The two float tubers, as far as I could tell, had still picked up nothing. At this point I feel its my duty to point out that Nick’s fish was a complete fluke (I hope he’s reading this). He tossed out his brightly colour fly, and started retrieving it. During the retrieve process he got pissed off at the midges around his head, took off his cap, and started swatting at them madly. It was at this point that the fish nailed his fly, and he was “on dad”…Lucky bastard…
Sadly that was to be it for us. We fished until around 1pm when the wind picked up, but managed no further fish. What was so frustrating was that we could see a lot of fish in the shallows, cruising on the edges of the weed beds. Hours of sight casting to them with every fly in my box produced not so much as a follow. Clearly a trip back is in order to work those bastard out..