A morning on Finlough

Not the famous salmon fishery in the west of Ireland, this is instead a coarse lake near to Strokestown in the county Roscommon. I had planned to fish on Monday but the Mayo victory against Kerry the previous day scuppered that as celebratory drinks got completely out of hand. An alcohol fuelled late night rendered me fit for nothing come Monday morning. Now fully recovered, I was ready to do some fishing when Tuesday rolled around.

I have previously fished a few lakes close to Strokestown, but this would be my first time on Finlough. It’s a rectangular shaped lake with reeds all around it and is home to roach, rudd, hybrids, bream and tench. The reason for deciding to fish this particular water was the wind direction, it would blow from the south all day and that should put the breeze behind me, hopefully making fishing a tad easier. My plan was to target tench on the feeder and silvers on the waggler. With that in mind I prepared the tackle and loaded up the car the evening before so I could make an early start. The 5am alarm was a bit of a shock to the system, but I rose and left pretty close to my planned time. A few stragglers in green and red jerseys were still walking home in the grey drizzle, hardy warriors dragging every last ounce of joy from the win on Sunday. It was looking like I was going to have a wet day but the rain stopped around Tulsk and I was to enjoy a dry, if somewhat clammy session. An hour and fifteen minutes after leaving home I pulled up outside a fine house with the lake but a short walk away over a stile and down an overgrown lane.

Fishing is off either of a pair of stands on the south bank and I chose the first one for no good reason. Fabricated from timber, which was slightly warped but otherwise grand, these are double stands with plenty of room for two anglers, but today I had the place to myself. The lough looks to be shallow with reeds and lilies not just around the edges but out in the middle too. Peering over the edge of the stand into the clear water I could see lots of small fish milling around, mainly rudd but some perch too. Taking that as a good sign I tackled up the feeder rod first and fired it out to my left and close to some lilies. I went for a black cap maggot feeder, a 5 pound hooklink to a size 12. Next, the 11 foot float rod with a waggler and 4 pound hook length to a size 14 barbless. My logic here was with so many small silvers around I would go a size bigger than my usual size sixteen hooks, bait them with 4 or 5 maggots and hope to reduce the number of bites from the smallest fish. Casting the float three rod lengths out, I fed balls of ground bait and loose fed maggots into the swim.

It would turn out to be an odd sort of session with bites coming in flurries of about 20 minutes, then silence for the next half an hour. This repeated almost exactly from the time I started at 7am until when I packed it in about 2 o’clock. Here is the interesting thing – because I could see silvers clearly in from of the stand I decided to try an experiment. When the bites dried up I shortened the drop and plonked my float right in front of me where I could watch the fish’s reactions. When the maggots were falling through the water column they rushed at them but didn’t swallow the hook. They nudged it and swam very, very close to it, but none of them took the baited hook in their mouth. A while later the fish came on the feed once again and I was catching them 3 rod lengths out. I repeated the experiment and this time I was hooking rudd and roach now problem. For reasons I can’t explain, the fish were switching on and off, feeding one minute then ignoring food the next. I am unsure what exactly I can learn form this, but it did show that the fish appear to ‘switch off” from feeding for short periods.

As is my want, I fiddled about with the float, initially setting up to fish over depth, then lifting the hook off the bottom for a few casts to see if that would work. Given that I failed to catch any tench I guess you can say none of these alterations made the slightest difference! While the tench were asleep or otherwise engaged, rudd, roach and perch kept me busy. I toyed with the idea of dropping hook sizes but in the end I fished on with the same end tackle as when I started. Bites ranged from rattles and swift dips to mere tremors which were really hard to spot. As for the fish themselves, nothing remotely required the use of a net and I doubt if any of them would have made half a pound on a scales. A final tally of 50 rudd, 18 perch and 17 roach/hybrids, making 85 fish for the session. A competent whip angler would have easily doubled that catch.

I suspect Finlough might fish better very early or late in the day, perhaps even overnight. I won’t be in any mad hurry to go back there, I can fish waters much closer to home for a similar bag of silvers. The luxuriant weed growth on the bottom certainly gives the impression this would be a good tench lake. I can just picture them nosing about in the silt and weeds with streams of tiny bubbles breaking the surface. It just didn’t happen today.

This season I have been struggling to catch anything that will put a good bend in a rod. Oh, I am heaving out bags of small stuff, but the better class of fish are eluding me so far. I need to go off and have a think about that and come up with a plan for the rest of the year. I’m not worried about huge carp or anything like that, just the odd tench or dinner plate sized bream would make me happy. There won’t be any fishing for me for a few days as I am once again busy ghillieing until the middle of next week. After that I hope to get some time to fish myself and I have a few ideas to try out.