Ups and Downs

It wouldn't be right for me to just document My successful sessions, without reporting the less fruitful or more difficult ones and of course, the Blanks. Firstly, I dont want to kid anyone, I am just as prone to getting it wrong as anyone else and secondly there is nothing to learn from just writing about the good times without balancing the books by logging the bad ones.

As Anglers We are always on the lookout for patterns or indicators that will enable us to be repeatedly successful in our efforts to catch fish. The problem with this is, there are a huge amount of variables to contend with, whatever your type of fishing. It is up to us to study these variables as much as possible, and try to make reasonably accurate assessments of a given situation and decide when and how to best approach it. The only way to do this is through spending as much time as We can being involved in the pursuit of catching fish. Nothing beats experience, and the more experience you can get, the better you can become at what you do, and therefore make better decisions based on the information that has been gathered over time.
How the information is recorded is down to the individual, many Anglers keep Diaries or Logs( Blogs! ) of their sessions so they can look back and use what they have written to try and spot the afore mentioned patterns or key factors that will enable them to be consistently prolific at putting fish on the bank, hopefully! But as I said at the beginning there are no hard and fast rules in fishing, only sets of circumstances where all we can do is give it our best guess, how right We get it is down to Fate, the Fish, and a huge amount of Luck! Getting it wrong can be frustrating, and soul destroying, especially if you seem to be on a consistent run of bad luck and enduring blank after blank. But there is always something to be learned, not just from the good sessions but the bad ones too, it gives us something to gauge how successful we really are when things seem to be going right. It also teaches us when to expect things to be difficult, because no matter what, personally I need to fish, even when things are likely to be adverse. If I didn't fish when things didn't look right then I would end up hardly fishing at all probably! This is even more of an issue where Sea Angling is concerned, and having the right conditions for Fly fishing in the Salt is even more crucial, and sometimes so that we can continue to fish in this manner we have to push the boundaries of what can be done with the tackle and conditions, which are hardly ever perfect, certainly not in this country anyway!

So it has been this week as far as fishing the Fly for Bass has been concerned, the Wind is playing havoc with the Sea conditions around the Island the early part of this week and despite our best efforts not a thing has been caught. We stayed positive and fished well, despite the niggling thought at the back of our minds that really chances were pretty slim given the conditions. As always though there was something to take home from the sessions, to chew over and to file away for use another time. It may not always be very evident at the time what it is you have learnt from the session, but believe me there is always something....

The pressure is on over the weekend! I am hosting a 'Get Together' for some of My friends from the Sea Fishing.org Forum, and I hope to provide them with an enjoyable two days and a few Fish! I just hope the Wind behaves itself and doesn't make things as difficult as they have been the first part of the week. The venue I have chosen for them is, normally, (!) a very prolific one, and whilst bigger fish are harder to come by here there are usually good numbers of Fish around, whatever the weather...
Hopefully we should have good time, chatting and swapping fishy stories and banter, and enjoying each others company, regardless of the fish catching side of things. It should be good to get together with like minded people and exchange ideas and experiences, again there is always something to be learned. So I look forward to seeing them and hopefully there will be a good report to put up both here and on the Forum!