Trout and Fly Website Members Day Out on Menteith.

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George English


Today I fished the Lake of Menteith in Scotland, with the site members from Trout and Fly. It’s becoming an annual vigil to the Lake in the early part of the season and this year was no exception. Last year we took a good few to Menteith, but nothing like this year’s trip with the full lake being booked out to the site members. In addition, Sonik Sports were there for two days, promoting their product range to all and sundry.
 
I partnered JD in the boat and we left from Blyth at 3:30am to have a good run up to the lake, a run generally taking around 3 to 3.5 hours.
This would be JD’s first trip boat fishing and we were both really looking forward to it, although the weather forecast was horrendous with sleet and snow forecast and a maximum temperature of 2 degrees C! After a quick stop at Stirling services and being robbed without violence for £15.00 for two sausage baps and 2 cups of coffee, we hit the road for the final 16 miles.

After we did the meet and greet in the lodge we hit the water. Last year I saw a lad hammering fish in ‘Reedy Bay,’ so that was the place we would try first. Linda and Colin were already there and it wasn’t long before Linda was into a fish as we slowed down ready to hit the drift.
The wind was violent, but was pushing us along the bay towards Hotel Bay so things weren’t too bad on that front. I had set up a medium sink line with two blobs, a two tone yellow / orange blob with an orange blob on the point. JD threw in the drogue and I let out the first cast - bang, fish on and on the first cast!  JD was astonished as he thought it was going to be one of the purple days of fishing that come few and far between. Into the boat came a healthy stockie of no more than 2lbs. Blank off, much to my relief!

JD fished on with a few offers, but nothing to the net. We did this drift twice more with no reward other than a few offers.
I had a horrible feeling that first cast first fish would be the only fish that day for me and that’s happened before to most of us I’m sure, it has certainly happened to me a few times, Markle being the last one I care to remember.
We decided to change the location and head towards the cages at ‘Gateside Bay,’ nothing doing there either so I had a brew and JD went through his entire box and settled on another pattern.
We changed location again and had noticed that people were congregating up at ‘the butts’ there seemed to be quite a few boats there and I’m sure they didn’t want another, so we went to ‘International Bay’ the wind at this point was terrible and we were drifting faster than we could retrieve, so we were on the move again. This time to ‘Lochend Bay’ we passed Carl en route who said the bay was fishing well and that his boat partner had 7 fish from there so things were looking up, or so we thought. I took 1 more fish from the bay and JD was still struggling but he was managing the drogue and casting ok, which is half the battle in a boat.

I was only hit three times in the head, twice in the back and had a black booby fashioning my left arm as it was stuck in my jacket, other than that like I said doing ok. Lol.

We ate lunch in the boat and had a bit craic and pondered our next move. Paul Tag rang us and said that he was hitting fish just of ‘Inchmahome’ so that would be our next port of call, it was sheltered and offered us a break from this biting wind that was up to now spoiling a good days fishing.
We had a few drifts here and you would have thought it was a different day, being sheltered from the wind made for a much warmer and happier boat pairing. I put on a small cats boobie at this point and was taken by a pike!
 
We had a few more unsuccessful drifts around the two islands with nothing more doing and decided to fish back at Reedy bay for the last hour or so. The wind had almost disappeared by 4:30pm and we could see a fly hatch so we put on the floating lines and tried buzzer fishing. JD tempted a rise and missed the fish it just wasn’t his day. Boat fishing is very alien for bank side still water fishermen and I had forgotten just how alien it was. Both myself and to a greater extent JD are still new to this type of fishing but that’s not to say we didn’t thoroughly enjoy it, fishing like this on a huge lake such as Menteith is an excellent way to spend a day fishing and with the members and the craic proved yet again a truly memorable experience.
 
We will be back again next year for sure

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