Work could not finish quickly enough on Friday. The smiling BBC weatherman had announced to the nation, as they tucked into their tv dinners on Thursday evening, that summer was well and truly on the way. After months of monsoonal rains and frigid winds, the thought of Friday evenings promise of warm, humid air and soothing 6mph north westerly breeze seemed almost too good to be true. It was. Joe (Polite) made the long journey from Cardiff to join me at a Solent mullet mark for 6pm and must have been tempted to stay in his car rather than venture out onto the wave lashed flats. The weatherman's light nw breeze had somehow become a raging 20mph southerly! But venture he did, arriving just as the dark, brooding sky unleashed rains of biblical proportions.
But it takes more than a mere months worth of rain in 30 minutes to dampen the spirits of avid muleteers.
Under clement conditions, mullet make their presence so obvious that even Stevie Wonder would be in with a shout. This evenings maelstrom, however, rendered fish spotting an impossible task and we decided to fish blind over known lies. Red headed Diawl bachs (a la Ray Montgomery) featured on both casts and were dispatched to dead drift with the tumbling current around the drowning gravel bars. At 8pm, the passage of my 6wt floating halted briefly before shooting off through the turbulent shallows. The fish made a few short, fast runs before commencing the mandatory period of aggressive head shaking, which confirms the status of the hook hold. The status was not good and we parted company. At 8.05pm, one of my flies was pulled but my strike met no resistance. A few seconds later the fly line came to life oncemore. The mullet chose to fight at close quarters rather than burn its energy on high speed runs, electing to shake, rattle and roll for the next twenty minutes. For some reason I was a little nervous about the hook hold and my trepidation made worse by the mullet's insistance of repeatedly lifting its head from the water to display the Diawl bach precariously perched on the edge of its top lip, as if to say "Any second now mate, any second now". But the hook and my resolve remained intact and it was with some relief that a a thick lip of around 3lb slid into the net after twenty stubborn minutes.
Collin thanks (re)read that post. Interested / amazed at the (small) size of the flies that you are using - 12s and 16s. Would have assumed that a bigger fly would do the business. You are fishing the top water off a floating line rather than off the sand so what are the flies being taken as - small shrimp and the likes ? Especially the red d bach ? What does this cover in the salty food chain?
Charlie wrote:Collin thanks (re)read that post. Interested / amazed at the (small) size of the flies that you are using - 12s and 16s. Would have assumed that a bigger fly would do the business. You are fishing the top water off a floating line rather than off the sand so what are the flies being taken as - small shrimp and the likes ? Especially the red d bach ? What does this cover in the salty food chain?
Cheers Charlie
A question I posed over for quite some while. My suspicion is that a variety of current borne invertibrates (both dead and living) are available to the mullet and instead of accurately representing a particular organism, the successful flies are simply very good generic patterns. The floating line allows the flies to tumble along with the current in shallow water.
