Youth day was upon us, as was a lot of snow, so Nick and I grabbed the fly sticks (and float tubes) and headed for the berg. We opted to fish Mavela for the normal reason…its closest.
After a lot of bitching from Nick, I picked him up at 6am and we were on the water by 7:30. Sadly my eagerness didn’t pay off, and 6 hours later I hadn’t even had a knock. Nick missed one in the morning, but other than that I would’ve sworn the dam was barren of Trout.
I’m not really sure what it was? I suppose a lot of things were against us, namely:
A cold front had passed over the day before
The water was crystal clear, there was not a ripple on the surface, and it was sunny – all of this rendered us highly visible
It was mating season and the buggers clearly had only one thing on their minds
The entire bottom of the dam was covered in weed, so there was plenty of food
As for tactics…I tried every fly in my box, twice, and Nick even tried fishing New Zealand style rigs. We fished the middle of the dam and we fished the entire shore; We tried fished deep and we fished shallow, using every retrieve we knew (so at least 2). The end result – FAIL!
But on the up side, fishing with Nick is never boring…need I say more?