A Bad Day’s Fishing Is Better Than…

… better than a good day at work.  Above is David,  proudly using his new Snowbee Junior fly rod.  We didn’t catch any fish today – it was a very tough day with not even a single hit. No fish rising until about dusk, after we had taken down our rods and were walking away from the pond toward our car.  With two hot sunny days in a row, the fish just weren’t active.

We tried everything. Streamers, nymphs, buzzers and some different chironomid patterns, white, black, and everything in between, fast retrieves, slow retrieves, erratic retrieves, floating line, intermediate and fast sink.  Some days are like that. It was such a warm day that about an hour after the sunset and darkness fell, it was still 26 C.   We likely did manage to get our recommended daily dose of Vitamin D from the exposure to the afternoon sunshine.

It appeared it was even a hard day for the ospreys that were flying about.  Normally I’d see them quite often flying off with a fish in their claws – sometimes circling overhead as if to show off that they were catching fish and I wasn’t.  But today, even the ospreys didn’t seem to have anything to show off.   It was funny to watch a big heron land on the very tip top of an evergreen tree, and watch that tip bend under the weight of the bird.  The heron let out a loud noise – one of the worse and most coarse noises of any bird – as it extended its wings for either balance or an emergency take off.  It didn’t stay long on that perch.

In spite of the lack of action under the water, David and I had an enjoyable time together.  Of course, I had a few tangles to untangle, and a few warnings to warn about when a cast would not go quite right for him and the fly would go zinging perilously close to his head.  After a while, I decided because David’s sunglasses had been forgotten, I would take over all the casting duties but let David retrieve his own line.  I really like that Snowbee rod – it’s obviously not going to get terribly long casts at only 7′, but it is pretty decent.

Early in the evening, some clouds moved in and David thought it was pretty neat to see the reflections of the clouds in the water.

So even though the fish didn’t co-operate, it was still a very good day.  And I told David we may head back tomorrow, with a picnic lunch of sandwiches. Perhaps I’ll also bring along the new grill, and we’ll do some hotdogs too.  David loves hotdogs with his ketchup.