With a full week of ghillieing ahead of me, I made loose plans to fish on Sunday morning. An early start made sense so I had the gear all looked out the night before and set an alarm for 5am. Let’s just skip over that alarm (because I did) and move on to eight o’clock when I finally dragged my weary bones out of the bed. It is still too hot for me to sleep properly and as a result I’ve been exhausted for many days now. Coffee helped to kick start me and once I had dropped Helen off at the church for mass I headed down the road to Claremorris and a delayed start on Mayfield Lake.
Conditions were never going to be great, and I knew that before setting off. A wind out of the north blew down the lake, not gale force now, but strong enough to be problematical. For a change I had the place to myself and so picked the far stand on the west shore, a spot I have been meaning to fish for a while but someone else had always beaten me too it. Not today, and I tramped triumphantly on to the dirty white plastic pontoon, causing it to sway and buck. A few minutes setting all the gear up and then I could take stock of my new surroundings. The wind was causing wavelets of a couple of inches to run from left to right, and plumbing up revealed 12 feet of water up to tree rod lengths out. 40 yards ff to my left there was a bed of lily pads with clear water between me and the green stuff. Casting a feeder into that area meant I could easily keep a tight line, something which was ging to be difficult if I cast out and across the wind. Using a 40 gram maggot feeder I was able to fish this shallower water perfectly all session.
For some reason I had convinced myself the whole of this end of Mayfield was going to be shallower than the other spots I fish, but that was based on absolutely nothing and proved to be wildly wrong. With only an 11 foot float rod I had the choice of pushing the waggler set up to the very limit or go on to a slider. Here is where another problem came to light, I had no slider floats with me. Out of necessity I rigged a medium waggler, bulk shot at the float and BB for the tell tail. A size 16 spade end to a 4 pound hooklength was then baited with double maggot. I was fishing on the bottom with this lot, which was OK until I reeled in and the short rod made re-baiting/unhooking fish the source of many tangles.
What started off as a perfectly normal session turned into an interesting couple of hours. Feeding balls of ground bait in the swim and adding a pinch of loose maggots with each cast brought the fish on quickly. I had four nice roach in jig time, then it went a bit quiet. Adding a pair of small skimmers over about ten casts hardly felt like exhilarating sport, then I got a lucky break. I was reeling in to check the hook when a fish grabbed the maggots in mid-water. This wee roach got me thinking, what if the fish were holding in mid water instead of on the bottom? It was worth a try, so I lifted the hook a couple of feet of the bottom for the next cast. No good. Another foot of adjustment – nope, nothing doing. This went on until I was at roughly four and a half feet below the float. Bingo! Roach and skimmers galore with fish hooked and lost, coming to hand or sucking the maggots off my hook. Just to keep me on my toes, the feeder rod began to get some attention and at times I had both rods bent into fish. Happy days…
An hour or more passed, then it slowed down to only a trickle of offers. I was doing nothing differently but the bites were getting further and further apart. Sitting there in the blazing sun I tried to think through what was happening out of sight in the brown water. Had the shoal dispersed and moved off? Had a pike come into the swim? Or had the fish changed depth again? Favouring the last option, I began to reverse the position of the waggler, dropping the hook a foot at a time. This went on until I was fishing on the bottom again. Now, while this series of adjustments was going on the wind had picked up a bit and those wavelets were now a good 3 or 4 inched in height. I watched my float bobbing up and down and thought my best option was to go over depth so the maggots were resting on the bottom and not leaping up and down like Rudolf Nureyev. That worked; sort of. The fish were down there on the bottom alright and they were taking my baited hook. The issue was seeing the bites. All that movement on the float made it the devils own work to spot what was a bite and what was simply the waggler being tossed around in the waves. I missed loads of fish and wound in a bare hook on most casts.
All these shenanigans had to come to an end and so I packed up after three very enjoyable hours. The wind caused me no end of difficulties, wrapping the line around my rod when casting, driving me mad trying to spot bites and blowing anything loose around the peg. Despite this I ended up landing 41 roach, all of respectable, if unspectacular, proportions. Add to that 17 skimmers and 4 perch, I had a total of 62 fish in three hours, not too shabby in my opinion. Two of the perch were solid half pounders, which may not sound much that is a decent perch for an Irish lough. I nearly had a two pound bream on the feeder as well, but it threw the hook just as I reached for the net.
I’m still learning how to fish Mayfield lake. Pre-baiting is going to be my next step in an effort to concentrate the skimmers and bream into a swim. On this popular lake that could all go horribly wrong if someone else fishes a swim I have pre-baited, but that is the chance you take. It is close to home for me and ideal for using up spare maggots left over from travels further afield. It has gone from ‘probably nothing in there’ to ‘looking forward to fishing it again’ in my estimation. Helen enjoys Sunday morning mass, the heathen I am gains similar joy from a cloudy lake on the edge of Claremorris
At home now I have to clean all the tackle as it is filthy with slime once again. I also have to sort out the floats in my tackle box. For some unknown reason my river floats seem to have gathered in the box, leaving no room for other designs. There is the perfect excuse to mess around this evening with little bits of fishing gear while sipping a glass of wine. A lovely way to round off a lazy Sunday.
Claretbumbler 