Especially for Irene,
I was invited back to Crathes again for a day, so I bit the guys hand off to make sure I could get a day. There hasn't been much rain/snow melt to speak of and the catch counts for the whole week on the Dee have been pretty low. But yesterday dawned a fair but dry day and off I set.
I settled for an intermdiate line, fast sink tip and a monkey tied on a 22mm bottle tube to start with. Switched to an 1-1/4" gold boddied willie gunn, switched to a tungesten cone head with a plastic tube body and touched nothing through the first two pools despite seing more fish jumping then I've ever seen in a day before in the first few hours. I had a blether with the ghillie before heading downstream to the next pool. His advice " the only thing they hinnae seen this week is a sunray, have you got ene in yer box loon?" Needless to say I raked through my box and found a conns sunray off of Orvis. Stripped that for about ten casts but I still wasn't feeling confident. Switched to a normal sunray on an 1-1/4" aluminium tube, second cast bang fish on. Then nothing, the kelt was still on but was reeled in and landed in about sixty seconds. Sadly after lunch my lone conventional sunray suffered an accident either on a rock or at the teeth of a fish it lost it's wing and had to be retired (still got the tube mind, I can use that again!) and the only other sunray/monkey type things I had were on weight tubes.
So that's two outings, zero springers.
I went back for a walk along the riverbank with the neglected Mrs Henderson this afternoon and took the camera with me.
Looking downstream through the saw mill pool:
Downstream through Pantoch (or floating banks I forget which)
Looking downstream at No Man's land (it's like wading only harder fishing that bit) and on to the top of the island:
There's always next time
:z19
Matt
