Tuesday 20 August 2013

Painful loss

There has been a fair bit of action down down on my Sunday beat since the weather has cooled down and with a slight rise towards the end of the week things were looking up. I planned to go down on Sunday afternoon / evening as opposed to my usual morning jaunt. As I 'enjoyed' the imposed morning no fishing time I had a message from Tony showing a nice fish being returned.


I congratulated him whilst hoping that there would be another taking fish for me when I visited later on. Another SMS of a fish had me panicking that he'd had another, A quick reply confirmed that it was the same fish so panic over.

I eventually got down there for about 6pm. A few casts confirmed that Poppy had got over her fright of a spinner in the nose since the last trip and was happily back to her normal self- being generally annoying running along the bank ahead of me!

We soon reached the point of the 'Spinner in dog nose' incident and it became apparent she'd not forgotten at all. She gave the spot a wide birth keeping about 25 yards behind me at all times until reluctantly, she got closer and eventually dropped her guard again once we safely about 100m upstream. By this point we reached a fishy little pool and bend where I have seen fish follow but never actually hooked one. I cast a few times along the far bank and retrieved very slowly along the deep edge of the reeds in the hole at the run out of the pool. I saw a big flash at the same time I felt the double tap of a fish. Almost instantly I realised it was big, very big! The fish took off across the pool and stayed deep along the far bank. After a while it started to slowly make its way towards the tail of the pool, I decided this could be bad so i ran down below the fish and managed to get it to turn. A strong run saw the fish head up over the head of the pool into a shallow run above. At this point I realised it was easily a 20 and surprisingly, for this time of the year was very fresh, Poppy was getting very excited and wanted to get in with the fish. After a couple of minutes I thought it might be time to unship the net. I should have known this was a bad move, the fish had one last run and shot off back to its lie and kept going right into the reeds, all locked up tight. After a few seconds I realised it was not coming out in a hurry. Poppy looked at the reeds, at me, and back at the reeds, she was clearly confused and looked at me for answers. After a couple of minutes I thought there was nothing else for it but to try and pull the fish out as I could feel nothing. Eventually the knot parted leaving both Poppy and I totally gutted. I was sure that the fish had swam into the reeds and snagged the treble and shed the  hook and made off.

After the loss of this cracking fish I fished up to the hut with no enthusiasm whatsoever - I was gutted and just felt empty. I'd like to think I was philosophical about the loss of this fine fish but I have to admit, I was just plain old P****d off!

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